Alexander Bubb - WB Yeats

Alexander Bubb - Main Quadrangle of UCL

Alexander Bubb - Red Lion Square

Susheila Nasta - Russell Square Underground/Tour Begins

Susheila Nasta - North East corner Gordon Sq

Susheila Nasta - Fitzroy Tavern / Fitzrovia

Romesh Gunsekera - Poetry London Offices

Romesh Gunsekera - Tavistock Square

Thirty years ago, the Berlin Wall was pulled down. With the resurgence of interest in the boundaries and borders of nations across the world, is the symbol of that wall still potent in 2019? Do walls and censorship go hand-in-hand? For Banned Books Week, David Hare and Ben Okri discuss the history of real walls and their impact on writing, and how imagined walls figure in literature. David Hare is a playwright and film-maker. He has written over thirty plays which include Plenty and Skylight. His many screenplays include The Hours, The Reader and the Worricker trilogy. Ben Okri is a poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer and playwright. His novels include the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, the first in a trilogy, and The Freedom Artist, published in 2019.

Their conversation is chaired by Samira Ahmed  – a freelance journalist, writer and broadcaster at the BBC, where she presents Radio 4's Front Row and Newswatch on BBC1. She is the host of the Intelligence Squared podcast ‘How I Found My Voice’

This is a Banned Books Week event in partnership with the British Library, English PEN, Free Word, Hachette UK, Index on Censorship, Islington Council’s Library and Heritage Service, Libraries Connected, Media Diversified and The Publisher’s Association.

Walled In - Banned Books Week 2019 (David Hare and Ben Okri)

Does a writer’s work grow or diminish as it is remade? Does the experience of adapting another’s work change a writer’s approach to adaptations of their own? And is the process of adaptation a collaboration? Max Porter’s verse novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers was adapted for the stage by Enda Walsh in 2018 in a production that went on to tour internationally. In 2019, on the publication day of his second novel, Lanny, it was announced that Rachel Weisz would produce and star in the film adaptation. Inua Ellams’ adaptation of Three Sisters, playing at the National Theatre until February 2020, takes Chekhov’s play into 1960s Nigeria and the Biafran War. In 2020, Inua is also creating an afro-futurist reimagining of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince with Fuel Theatre Company. In this event, Max and Inua explore the creative afterlives of texts, lives the writer might have imagined – or not. Their discussion is chaired by Online Editor of Guardian Books, Sian Cain.

We are grateful to the TLS for supporting this event.

Remaking The Remarkable

Of writing biography, Hermione Lee has said, ‘There is a tension between the muddle and repetition and fragmentariness of a life, and the desire of the biographer to turn it into story narrative.’ How does a biographer make sense of a life’s complexities? In this event, four writers consider experimental life-writing and the limits of biography. Lara Feigel is a literary critic and Reader in Modern Literature at King’s College London. Her most recent book, Free Woman, is part personal memoir and part biography of Doris Lessing. Delia Jarrett Macauley is the author of the novel Moses, Citizen and Me, winner of the 2005 Orwell Prize, and a biography of the writer and first Black woman employed by the BBC, Una Marson. Anthony Joseph is a poet, novelist, and musician. His most recent book, Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon, combines fact with the imaginative structure of the novel. They are joined by biographer and critic Hermione Lee, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald.

We are grateful to the Royal Literary Fund for sponsoring this event.

Writing Lives

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.

Walled In - Banned Books Week 2019 (David Hare and Ben Okri)

Royal Society Literature

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