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For Minisode Nineteen we’re doing something a little different - this episode is sponsored by publisher Serpent’s Tail, who are celebrating their thirty-fifth birthday this year (just like both of us!). We’ve had many of their authors on the show over the years, including Chris Kraus, Carmen Maria Machado, Mary Gaitskill, Esi Edugyan and Sarah Perry. So in honour of their birthday, we talked to Serpent’s Tail publisher Hannah Westland about what it's like to be an editor, how she works with authors and with text, and what it means to be looking for fresh talent. Plus she gave some hot tips about upcoming books this Spring. We hope you enjoy it!

https://serpentstail.com/

Literary Friction - Inside Publishing with Hannah Westland from Serpent's Tail (Sponsored Episode)

The short story, V.S. Pritchett once wrote, “is exquisitely difficult”. He was speaking, of course, from the writer’s point of view – for readers, short stories are often exquisitely satisfying. Celebrating the presentation of the RSL’s annual V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, this year’s judges discuss the hazards and joys of writing short fiction.

Adam Mars-Jones published two volumes of short stories, Lantern Lecture, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, and Monopolies of Loss, before being fatally tempted away from concision in fiction with the series novel Pilcrow. Rose Tremain won the Dylan Thomas Award for her first collection of stories, The Colonel’s Daughter, and has published four further volumes of short stories, most recently The American Lover, which comes out in paperback this autumn. Philip Hensher has spent the last two years immersed in short stories as editor of The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, published in October.

We are grateful to ALCS for supporting this event, to Christopher and Jennie Bland for sponsoring the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, and to Prospect for publishing the winning entry.

V.S. Pritchett Prize 2015 - Philip Hensher, Adam Mars-Jones, Rose Tremain

A discussion on Henry James as critic by Man Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst in conversation with Carlo Gébler.
About the speakers
Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954 and was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. Hollinghurst was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995. He has published five novels including The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and The Stranger's Child (2011). His acclaimed novel The Folding Star (1994) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). His novel, The Line of Beauty (2004), traces a decade of change and tragedy and won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. His new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, will be published in 2017.  He lives in London.
Carlo Gébler 

Carlo Gébler was born Dublin in 1954, the eldest son of writer parents, Ernest Gébler and Edna O'Brien. He has a PhD from Queen's University, Belfast. Gébler has made a number of documentary films and is also the author of several novels, children’s novels, plays for both radio and the stage, and librettos.  He has also worked as a teacher and academic. In the early nineties he was the creative writing tutor at the Maze prison and since 1997 he has been the writer-in-residence in HMP Maghaberry. In addition he has taught creative writing at Trinity College, Dublin, where he has been a visiting fellow four times, and at Queen’s University, Belfast.  Carlo Gebler was elected a member of the Aosdána in 1990.

Alan Hollinghurst in conversation with Carlo Gébler on Henry James as critic

Alan Hollinghurst & Marlon James: Hidden Histories

Author, poet and short storyteller Alan Hollinghurst talking with Marlon James about how fiction can capture lives on the margins of history.


“Someone called me ‘Booker Bruiser Marlon James”


They talked about the differences and similarities between their methods of writing; whether they’d call themselves “writers of gay novels”; who can, and who can’t use adverbs; how sometimes they can’t finish a book, and the relief when they do; and most notably that they were wearing the same socks.

Alan Hollinghurst & Marlon James: Hidden Histories

May 2, 2010 | French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), Tinker Auditorium | NYC

With Colm Toíbín and Christos Tsiolkas

Christos Tsiolkas, the Greek-Australian author of Loaded and The Jesus Man, has created an international scene with his Commonwealth Writer’s Prize–winning novel The Slap, published here this month. Join him and groundbreaking Booker Prize–winning Irish novelist Colm Toíbín, whose books include The Blackwater Lightship, The Story of the Night, and most recently, Brooklyn, for a discussion of some of the common themes that connect their work—from sexual identity to literary taboos.

The Slap: A Conversation with Colm Toíbín and Christos Tsiolkas

A S Byatt talks to fellow novelist Philip Hensher about the experience of having her portrait created, and reflects on the tradition of painting not from life, but interior imagining.

Portraits of Writers Series - A.S. Byatt and Philip Hensher

‘Dalloway Day’, in its second year in 2019,  is a celebration of one of the 20th Century’s most important novels, and seeks to make Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway to London what James Joyce and Ulysses are to Dublin with the annual ‘Bloomsday’. In this event, renowned Woolf scholar Professor Dame Gillian Beer is joined by Alexandra Harris to discuss love and presence in Mrs Dalloway.

Professor Dame Gillian Beer was the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1994 until her retirement in 2002. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, and was made a Dame in 1998. Among her books are Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground and Alice in Space: the Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll. Alexandra Harris is a writer and academic. Her books include Romantic Moderns, a biography of Virginia Woolf, and Weatherland: Artists and Writers under English Skies.

For There She Was: Love and Presence in Mrs Dalloway_Dalloway Day 2019

While walking through London, in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, Monica Ali concludes that ‘trying to get the measure of London is futile. Better to do as Woolf does and catch at thoughts and feelings, the immediate perception of things, so  as to be able to say, like Lily Briscoe in To The Lighthouse, Yes, I have had my vision.’ While time may have changed the city, Woolf’s nuanced way of capturing a moment or a place, in all its immediacy, has influenced generations of writers after her. Why does Virginia Woolf continue to be such a powerful point of reference for writers working today? And why does she still have so much to show writers about themselves? 

For the 2019 Dalloway Day – a whole day dedicated to the celebration Woolf’s one-day novel Mrs Dalloway – Monica Ali, Elif Shafak and  Patricia Waugh discuss Woolf’s influence and the challenges of interpolating one of the 20th Century’s most significant writers in works inflected by their own lives.

After Woolf, with Monica Ali and Elif Shafak - Dalloway Day 2019

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

Kate and Medaya welcome essayist Brian Dillon, author of Suppose a Sentence which offers sharp analysis (along with intriguing discursus) of 27 sentences, both celebrated and obscure, from the likes of William Shakespeare, James Baldwin, John Ruskin, and Joan Didion. Brian opens the show with a passage from his introduction, a paean to the work of the writers he loves and the expansive possibilities of a single line. The conversation focuses on the joys and perils of close reading and reverie.
Also, Claudio Lomnitz, author of Nuestra America: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation, returns to recommend On Kings by anthropologists David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins - and relate its lessons to the reign of Donald Trump.

Brian Dillon Supposes a Sentence

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.

Writing Lives

Royal Society Literature