Encore: The Phenomenon of the second novel
Some novelists hit a remarkable seam on their second outings, and among the second novels that have earned their place in history are The Mill on the Floss, Pride and Prejudice, The Master and Margarita, Fahrenheit 451 and Midnight’s Children. This year the RSL takes over the administration of the ¬£10,000 Encore Award, founded in […]
The Art of Non-Fiction
As non-fiction writers become more innovative in finding new structures and voices with which to tell their stories, how do they decide on their approach? What are the literary models on which they draw? Hisham Matar’s first novel, In the Country of Men, won several prizes, including the 2007 RSL Ondaatje Prize. Last year he […]
Why Race Matters
How has the intersection of race, feminism and class evolved since the 1980s? Reni Eddo-Lodge is a young, black, feminist journalist who burst on to the literary scene with her 2014 blog post ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race’, which went viral. Her first book – of the same title – […]
Literature Matters: The Stories that Shape Us
‘Creed. Colour. Country. Culture. All these things can become forms of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. But that’s not to deny that they can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can […]
Peace Poetry
BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Shahidha Bari chairs a conversation between three RSL poet Fellows, in which they consider Wilfred Owen’s life and death, and the relationship between poetry and peace in their own lifetimes. Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke’s work has been on the GCSE and A Level exam syllabus for the past […]
Sarah Losh: architect, antiquarian and visionary
Jenny Uglow celebrates National Women’s History Month, and its theme ‘women inspiring innovation through imagination’, with a talk about Sarah Losh, who built an extraordinary church in a village near Carlisle in the 1840s. As a woman innovator, Losh broke all conventions in designing the church, supervising its building, and even carving the alabaster – […]
Coming Out
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Feeling Jewish
In the wake of accusations of antisemitism in the British political sphere, four writers explore the portrayal of Jews in American literature and ask how such evocations might affect social perceptions. Zachary Leader is the biographer of Saul Bellow, whose Herzog and Sammler acquired iconic status. Devorah Baum lectures at the University of Southampton and […]
Picasso’s Faces
In his BBC series ‘The Face of Britain’ historian and writer Simon Schama explored British portraiture and what it revealed about the ‘individual and collective psyche’ of the time. With the NPG’s wide-ranging Autumn 2016 exhibition of Picasso’s portraits, he turns his attention to the painter’s evocations of lovers, family and friends. With writer and […]
The Good Immigrant
What does it mean to be an immigrant in the UK today? Journalist and BBC presenter Razia Iqbal chairs a discussion on immigration, race, identity and writing. Vahni Capildeo’s latest poetry collection, Measures of Expatriation, speaks of ‘the complex alienation of the expatriate’, and addresses wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society. Writer and […]
Norman Manea in conversation with Paul Bailey
Pascale Petit reads her commissioned poem ‘The Spring’ – commemorating 100 years since the death of Wilfred Owen.
Translating Russia: on writer and translator Boris Pasternak
Russia’s novelists have enriched English literature from the first translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky onwards, and our knowledge of twentieth-century Russia has been ennobled by understanding the courage of its great poets. To mark the fiftieth anniversary both of the Translators’ Association and of the first English translation of Dr Zhivago, Dmitry Bykov, visiting from […]