Structo Magazine’s interview with MSt alumna Bette Adriaanse about her novel Rus Like Everyone Else is now available online.
Narratives by Ali Smith and Etgar Keret are fourth edition of Matchbook Stories, edited by MSt alumna Ioanna Mavrou.
Book Ex Machina is based in Nicosia, Cyprus, and run by author Thodoris Tzalavras and editor Ioanna Mavrou.
“Wilfully stopping his ears: the writing of The Novel: A Biography“
Professor Michael Schmidt
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary
Michael Schmidt must have known that The Novel: a Biography was a project doomed to fail. Yet he started his fourteen year odyssey, sceptical of theory, alert to the various pleasures of reading – and writing. The Daily Beast called the book ‘a delightful tale… that reminds is of exactly why we read’. In the New York Times John Sutherland said, ‘What vindicates Schmidt’s willful stopping of his ears to the irrelevant chatter of academic scholarship is that he himself reads so intelligently and writes so pungently… a herculean literary labor, carried off with swashbuckling style and critical aggression.’
Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. His most ambitious prose books are Lives of the Poets, The First Poets and The Novel: a biography. A poet and novelist himself, he founded and runs Carcanet Press and PN Review. Until recently he was a professor at Glasgow and Cambridge.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
“Telling Lives: The Challenge of the Family Memoir”
Dr Lyndall Gordon
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary
Lyndall Gordon grew up in Cape Town where she studied history and English, then nineteenth-century American literature at Columbia in New York. In 1973 she came to England through the Rhodes Trust. For many years she was a tutor and lecturer in English at Oxford where she is now Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College.
Virago has published her six biographies and two memoirs, which include Eliot’s Early Years, which won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life, winner of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature; Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, longlisted for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize, and Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds, short-listed for the Duff Cooper prize and for Italy’s Comisso prize for biography. Her most recent publication is a memoir, Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter (2014). Dr Gordon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and member of PEN
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
MSt tutor Helen Marshall’s short story collection Gifts for the One Who Comes After has won the World Fantasy Award in the category of Best Collection
More about Gifts for the One Who Comes After, on the publisher’s website.
MSt alumnus Sam Guglani’s piece “On the Given Word” has been published in the Lancet.
“She’s admitted with pneumonia and within days is with us on the intensive care unit, needing renal filtering and inotropes. One night her airway occludes and a few of us work around her, as if gathered in prayer …”
MSt tutor Eileen Horne’s Zola and the Victorians published by Maclehose Press, is available from 12th November 2015.
From the Maclehose Press page: “…this book offers both new readers and aficionados the untold story of Zola’s original reception in England: ‘When the filthy French met the Virtuous Victorians’… This lively, often humorous, ironic, and ultimately tragic exploration of the consequences of both translation and censorship is told from multiple points of view, illustrated with a wealth of contemporary cartoons and illustrations and is based on a rich trove of letters, trial transcripts, journals and manuscripts. “
MSt tutor Roopa Farooki is one of six authors on “Writers on the pain of hindsight in publishing: ‘It’s like a bad breakup – you have to move on’“, published in the Guardian, 9th November 2015.
MSt tutor Eileen Horne’s radio drama “The Lost Sister”, broadcast on 6th Novembe 2015 on Radio 4, is now available on iPlayer
From the programme page: “A family drama and detective story, this is the author’s unflinching account of her search for a sister more abandoned than lost – exploring the consequences of our fear of mental illness as she relives a turbulent past.”
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