Giving the Gift of Offence w/@MartinRowson

Martin’s talk will be on Giving the Gift of Offence, exploring 32000 years of visual satire, why we have it, how it works and how the powerful – both religious and secular – respond. There will be foul images and strong language.

Martin Rowson is a multi-award winning cartoonist and writer, whose work has appeared regularly in The Guardian, The Daily Mirror, The Times, The New Statesman, The Spectator, The Independent on Sunday, Morning Star, New Humanist and many other publications. His books include graphic novelisations of T S Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” and Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”, as well as a memoir about his dead parents, “Stuff”, which was longlisted for the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize, and “The Dog Allusion”, an irrational atheist’s answer to Richard Dawkins.

Martin is a trustee of the British Humanist Association and the Zoological Society of London (where he’s twice been a vice-president) as well as being Chairman of the British Cartoonists’ Association, and between 2001 and 2008 he was Mayor Ken Livingstone’s Cartoonist Laureate for London, in exchange for 1 pint of London Pride bitter per annum (still currently 6 years in arrears).

Martin has two children in their twenties, and he and his wife have lived in various parts of Lewisham for 30 years. You get half that for murder these days.