Name: Ruth Rendell interviewed by RSL Events Manager Lucy Clouting by Royal Society Literature in Various Lit
Duration: 9 min 14 s
Description: Crime writer Ruth Rendell gave a Masterclass to fourteen participants for the RSL/Booker Prize Foundation series, on 22 June 2013. Here, she speaks to RSL Events Manager Lucy Clouting about her work and gives her top tips for writers.

Various Lit

Crime writer Ruth Rendell gave a Masterclass to fourteen participants for the RSL/Booker Prize Foundation series, on 22 June 2013. Here, she speaks to RSL Events Manager Lucy Clouting about her work and gives her top tips for writers.

Ruth Rendell interviewed by RSL Events Manager Lucy Clouting

Novelist and short story writer Margaret Drabble discusses the ethics of portraiture, the public versus the private image, the defining of character in paint and prose, and the many faces of Doris Lessing.

This event was part of 'Portraits of Writers', a series of talks in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, to coincide with the exhibition 'On Paper: Portraits of Writers'.

Portraits Of Writers Royal Society Of Literature - Margret Drabble on Doris Lessing

One hundred years after the outbreak of the Great War, Peter Parker introduces four writers, and the pieces of First World War literature that mean most to them. Poet and fiction writer Tobias Hill looks at Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. The Irish poet Michael Longley, whose father was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry during the First World War, reads from the poetry of Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas, as well as his own war-inspired work. Timberlake Wertenbaker, whose most recent play, Our Ajax, looks at the trauma of modern warfare, explains how she was
marked by Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. And Louisa Young, author of the bestselling First World War novel My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, considers The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West.

Voices of the Great War

THE T.S. ELIOT MEMORIAL MEETING

W.H. Auden once called poetry “a way of happening”, and in his own work the way was a marvellous one, striking a deep, popular chord. His “Funeral Blues” provides the only moment of gravity in Four Weddings and a Funeral; “September 1, 1939” was faxed around New York in the aftermath of 9/11. For Alexander McCall Smith, creator of the bestselling No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, Auden has for many years acted as a kind of invisible moral tutor, informing his responses to fundamental questions about life. In What Auden Can Do for You, published last year, he argues that this great poet can enhance the lives of all of us. Edward Mendelson, who corresponds with the fictional sleuth Isabel Dalhousie in McCall Smith’s novel The Right Attitude to Rain, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is literary executor of Auden’s estate, the editor of several collections of his work, and the author of many books about him. In a conversation interspersed with readings, they discuss what Auden has meant to them personally, and the ways in which he continues to speak to us more than forty years after his death.

We are grateful to Old Possum's Practical Trust for sponsoring this event.

Auden and us

Orlando Figes, one of the leading historians of twentieth-century Russia, will speak about 'Just Send Me Word', published in 2012. Based on the largest known collection of private correspondence from the Gulag, the book tells the extraordinary story of a prisoner of Pechora Labour Camp and his girlfriend in Moscow through their 1,246 letters.

In this recording from December 2012, Figes is introduced by Susan Richards, author of 'Lost and Found in Russia' and founder editor of openDemocracy Russia.

We are grateful to Robert Skidelsky for sponsoring this lecture.

Orlando Figes - Love in a very cold climate

Founded in 1820, the RSL acts as a voice for the value of literature, honouring and supporting emerging and established writers whilst creating a bridge between authors and audiences of all backgrounds and experiences to engage as many people as possible with the wealth of literature in the UK.

Ruth Rendell interviewed by RSL Events Manager Lucy Clouting

Royal Society Literature

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