Blackwell’s is delighted to be joined by Liz Hoare and Toddy Hoare as they explore together finding faith in literature. They will be introducing Liz’s new book ‘Twelve Great Spiritual Writers’ as well as discussing their process in writing books, people who have inspired them and Toddy’s book ‘Remaining Reverend’.

Make 2020 the year of good well-being and rest, join us for a talk with Claudia Hammond, author of ‘The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age’ as she explores why rest is important and offers positive actions we can do to look after ourselves better, to live a balanced rested lifestyle.

Synopsis

Today busyness has become a badge of honour. We want to say we’re busy, yet at the same time we feel exhausted. Instead we should start taking rest seriously as a method of self-care and this book can help us to work out how.

The Art of Rest draws on ground-breaking research Claudia Hammond collaborated on – ‘The Rest Test’ – the largest global survey into rest ever undertaken, which was completed by 18,000 people across 135 different countries. Much of value has been written about sleep, but rest is different; it is how we unwind, calm our minds and recharge our bodies. And, as the survey revealed, how much rest you get is directly linked to your sense of well-being.

Counting down through the top ten activities which people find most restful, Hammond explains why rest matters, examines the science behind the results to establish what really works and offers a roadmap for a new, more restful and balanced life.

“At a time when our waking lives appear to be more frantic and distracted than ever before, switching off has never been more of a challenge. The Art of Rest equips us with fresh research and information on how to rest more, and rest better, to get the most out of life. Reading it is a rest itself” – MATT HAIG

Claudia Hammond is an award-winning writer and broadcaster and lectures in psychology at Boston University’s base in London. As the presenter of All in the Mind she is BBC Radio 4’s voice of psychology and mental health. She has been awarded the President’s Medal from the British Academy, the British Psychological Society’s Public Engagement & Media Award, Mind’s Making a Difference Award and the British Neuroscience Association’s Public Understanding of Neuroscience Award. She is the author of Emotional Rollercoaster, Mind over Money and Time Warped, winner of the British Psychological Society’s Best Popular Science Book Award and the Aeon Transmission Award.

This event is free to attend, please register your attendance in advance. Please note, this talk will be taking place in our Philosophy Department which is accessible via a small set of stairs. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Blackwell’s is thrilled to be welcoming Klaus Dodds to the bookshop where he will be exploring ‘Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction’ as part of our ‘For Learning, For Life’ Series.

All ‘For Learning For Life’ talks are free to attend and everyone is welcome, please register in advance. Talks may be taking place in our Philosophy Department, which is only accessible via a small set of stairs. Seating is limited and will be allocated on a first come, first seated basis, with standing room available. For all enquiries, please email us on events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Claire Tomalin was born in 1933 in London to an English mother, the composer Muriel Herbert (linnrecords.com), and a French father. After a somewhat disorganised wartime childhood she studied at Cambridge, married the journalist Nicholas Tomalin, worked in publishing and journalism as literary editor of the New Statesman, then the Sunday Times, while bringing up their children. Nick was killed reporting the Yom Kippur war in 1973. In 1974 she published her first book The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize. Since then she has written Shelley and His World 1980; Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life 1987; The Invisible Woman: the story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens 1991 [NCR, Hawthornden, James Tait Black prizes, and a film with Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones, Joanna Scanlan, Tom Hollander]; Mrs Jordan’s Profession 1994; Jane Austen: A Life 1997; Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self 2002 [Whitbread biography and Book of the Year prizes, Pepys Society Prize, Rose Crawshay Prize]. Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man appeared in 2006, after which she made a television film about Hardy with Melvyn Bragg, and published a selection of Hardy’s poems. Her Charles Dickens: A Life was published in 2011. A collection of her reviews, Several Strangers, appeared in 1999, and a memoir, A Life of My Own, in 2017.
Her books are translated into many languages. She has honorary doctorates from Cambridge, UEA, Birmingham, the Open University, Greenwich, Goldsmith, Roehampton, Portsmouth and York universities.
She has served on the Committee of the London Library and as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Literary Fund, of the Royal Society of Literature and of English PEN.

Discover how art can inflict both harm and harmony in this special live performance of Iris Murdoch’s Art and Eros.

A panel discussion will follow a 45 minute play acted by Oxford Brookes University drama students. With panel members including actress Annette Badland and Murdoch biographer Anne Rowe, we’ll consider what Iris Murdoch’s work says about the meaning of art.

What’s it like to be haunted? Writer Jay Bernard’s augmented reality installation explores this question – unpicking how we can be haunted by our histories and our everyday lives.

Listen to a reading while exploring alternative realities in an AR experience that looks at how the past and present are closely linked.

The installation is based on their debut collection, ‘Surge’, which considered the aftermath of the 1981 New Cross Fire. Jay Bernard is the winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work Poetry and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

Part of The Think Human Festival
Everyone welcome

In this book colloquium, a panel discussion will assess British judge and historian Lord Sumption’s provocative bestseller Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics, which expands on arguments first laid out in his 2019 Reith Lectures.

In the past few decades, legislatures throughout the world have suffered from gridlock. In democracies, laws and policies are just as soon unpicked as made. It seems that Congress and Parliaments cannot forge progress or consensus. Moreover, courts often overturn decisions made by elected representatives.

In the absence of effective politicians, many turn to the courts to solve political and moral questions. Rulings from the Supreme Courts in the United States and United Kingdom, or the European court in Strasbourg may seem to end the debate but the division and debate does not subside. In fact, the absence of democratic accountability leads to radicalisation.

Judicial overreach cannot make up for the shortcomings of politicians. This is especially acute in the field of human rights. For instance, who should decide on abortion or prisoners’ rights to vote, elected politicians or appointed judges? Jonathan Sumption argues that the time has come to return some problems to the politicians.

Panellists:
Denis Galligan, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford

Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos, Associate Professor in Politics & International Relations, Oxford

Blackwell’s are honoured to be joined by author and literary critic Sinclair McKay who will be talking about his new book Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness, which commemorates the 75th Anniversary of the bombing of Dresden on February 13th 1945.

Synopsis:

In February 1945 the Allies obliterated Dresden, the ‘Florence of the Elbe’. Bombs weighing over 1,000 lbs fell every seven and a half seconds and an estimated 25,000 people were killed. Was Dresden a legitimate military target or was the bombing a last act of atavistic mass murder in a war already won?From the history of the city to the attack itself, conveyed in a minute-by-minute account from the first of the flares to the flames reaching almost a mile high – the wind so searingly hot that the lungs of those in its path were instantly scorched – through the eerie period of reconstruction, bestselling author Sinclair McKay creates a vast canvas and brings it alive with touching human detail.

Along the way we encounter, among many others across the city, an elderly air-raid warden and his wife vainly striving to keep order amid devouring flames, a doctor who carried on operating while his home was in ruins, novelist Kurt Vonnegut who never thought that his own side might want to unleash the roaring fire, and fifteen-year-old Winfried Bielss, who, having spent the evening ushering refugees, wanted to get home to his stamp collection.

Impeccably researched and deeply moving, McKay uses never-before-seen sources to relate the untold stories of civilians and vividly conveys the texture of contemporary life. Dresden is invoked as a byword for the illimitable cruelties of war, but with the distance of time, it is now possible to approach this subject with a much clearer gaze, and with a keener interest in the sorts of lives that ordinary people lived and lost, or tried to rebuild.

Writing with warmth and colour about morality in war, the instinct for survival, the gravity of mass destruction and the importance of memory, this is a master historian at work.

Sinclair McKay is the bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, The Secret Listeners, Bletchley Park Brainteasers and Secret Service Brainteasers. He is a literary critic for the Telegraph and the Spectator and lives in London.

This event is free, but please do register if you plan on attending. Seats are unallocated. Please be aware that this event will be taking place in the Philosophy Department, which is accessible by a short flight of stairs. For more information, please call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

We are delighted to be joined by best-selling author Kiran Millwood Hargrave to celebrate the launch of her new novel, The Mercies. Kiran will be in conversation with fellow author, Daisy Johnson.

Synopsis:

On Christmas Eve, 1617, the sea around the remote Norwegian island of Vardø is thrown into a reckless storm. As Maren Magnusdatter watches, forty fishermen, including her father and brother, are lost to the waves, the menfolk of Vardø wiped out in an instant.

Now the women must fend for themselves.

Eighteen months later, a sinister figure arrives. Summoned from Scotland to take control of a place at the edge of the civilized world, Absalom Cornet knows what he needs to do to bring the women of Vardø to heel. With him travels his young wife, Ursa. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa finds something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty and terrible evil, one he must root out at all costs.

Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1621 witch trials, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies is a story about how suspicion can twist its way through a community, and a love that may prove as dangerous as it is powerful.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave is an award-winning poet, playwright, and novelist. Her bestselling works for children include The Girl of Ink & Stars, and have won numerous awards including, the British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year, and the Blackwell’s Children’s Book of the Year, and been shortlisted for prizes such as the Costa Children’s Book Award and the Blue Peter Best Story Award. The Mercies is her first novel for adults. Kiran lives by the river in Oxford, with her husband, artist Tom de Freston, and their rescue cat, Luna.

Daisy Johnson’s debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her debut novel Everything Under which was also the Blackwell’s Book of the Year. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She currently lives in Oxford by the river and once worked as a Bookseller at Blackwell’s.

This is a free event, but please do register if you plan on attending. Please be aware that this event will take place in the Philosophy Department, which is accessible by a small flight of stairs. Seating is unallocated. For more information, please call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

In this book talk, Claas will review central findings of his research on the past 80 years of antibiotic use, resistance, and regulation in food production with introduction by Prof Mark Harrison, Director of Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities.

Mass-introduced after 1945, antibiotics helped revolutionise food production. Farmers and veterinarians used antibiotics to prevent and treat disease, protect plants, preserve food, and promote animals’ growth. Many soon became dependent on routine antibiotic use to sustain and increase production. The resulting growth of antibiotic infrastructures came at a price. Critics blamed antibiotics for leaving dangerous residues in food, enabling bad animal welfare, and selecting for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria, which could no longer be treated with antibiotics.

Pyrrhic Progress analyses over 80 years of evolving non-human antibiotic use on both sides of the Atlantic and introduces readers to the historical and current complexities of antibiotic stewardship in a time of rising AMR.

This talk includes a drinks reception and nibbles, all welcome

Blackwell’s are delighted to be joined by Petina Gappah to discuss her latest novel, Out of Darkness, Shining Light.

Synopsis

Petina Gappah’s epic journey through nineteenth-century Africa – following the funeral caravan who bore Bwana Daudi’s body – is ‘engrossing, beautiful and deeply imaginative.’ (Yaa Gyasi)

This is the story of the body of Bwana Daudi, the Doctor, the explorer David Livingstone – and the sixty-nine men and women who carried his remains for 1,500 miles so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own country.

The wise men of his age say Livingstone blazed into the darkness of their native land leaving a track of light behind where white men who followed him could tread in perfect safety. But in Petina Gappah’s radical novel, it is those in the shadows of history – those who saved a white man’s bones; his dark companions; his faithful retinue on an epic funeral march – whose voices are resurrected with searing intensity.

This final, fateful journey across the African interior is lead by Halima, Livingstone’s sharp-tongued cook, and three of his most devoted servants: Jacob, Chuma and Susi. Their tale of how his corpse was borne out of nineteenth-century Africa – carrying the maps that sowed the seeds of the continent’s brutal colonisation – has the power of myth. It is not only symbolic of slavery’s hypocrisy, but a portrait of a world trembling on the cusp of total change – and a celebration of human bravery, loyalty and love.

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her short fiction and essays have been published in eight countries. Her debut story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian First Book Award in 2009, and her first novel, The Book of Memory, was longlisted for the 2015 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction.

This event is free, but please do register if you plan on attending. Please note, this event may take place in the Philosophy Department which is accessible via a short flight of stairs. Seats are unallocated. For more information, please contact our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann was described by Anthony Burgess as “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” After making a case in support of this claim, I shall tell the story of the book’s creation. Among the topics to be discussed are how and why Ellmann became a biographer; how he chose Joyce as a subject; how he gained the cooperation of the Joyce estate and of Joyce’s family; how he collected Joyce’s papers (a matter of diplomacy, guile, doggedness and luck); how he conducted interviews and chose interviewees; how he placated publishers and thwarted competitors; how he determined the biography’s themes and structure, including the vexed problem of balancing narrative with literary analysis; and how and why he produced a second edition. The aim of the talk will be to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the way literary biographies are made, remind readers how much they can tell us about human behaviour and the creation of works of art, and make clear how gifted a writer and critic Ellmann was.

Lincoln Leads is a series of seminars tackling a different theme every week. All are warmly invited to attend this year’s Shakespeare Seminar on February 27th which will explore the question ‘Can Editing Influence a Play’s Legacy? with Prof. Henry Woudhuysen (Lincoln College), Prof. Lukas Erne (University of Geneva) and Eirian Yem (DPhil in English Literature). The panel will be chaired by Waqas Mirza (DPhil in French and English Literature).

The seminars take place in the Oakeshott Room at Lincoln College on Thursday evenings during Hilary term. Following a free wine reception from 5pm, each seminar will start at 5.45pm, culminating in a lively audience Q&A session that ends at 7pm. We have a fantastic group of panellists scheduled for the series. We therefore hope that you are eager to join them in conversation, and learn more about the diverse research conducted at Lincoln.

Tickets are free, but must be booked in advance. Spaces are limited and going fast, so make sure you sign up by clicking here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lincoln-leads-2020-tickets-87627477143

Do join us at the seminar to find out what Lincoln Leads is all about, and celebrate the diverse research connected with the College.
Bring all your friends, enjoy all the free wine and ask all the questions.

For more information on the seminar series, please visit our pages on social media: Facebook @lincolnleads

Blackwell’s are delighted to announce that we will be joined by award-winning science writer and broadcaster, Marcus Chown, who will be talking about his new book, The Magicians:The Visionaries Who Demonstrated the Miraculous Predictive Power of Science.

How does it feel to know something about the universe that no one has ever known before? And why is mathematics so magically good at revealing nature’s secrets?

This is the story of the magicians: the scientists who predicted the existence of unknown planets, black holes, invisible force fields, ripples in the fabric of space– time, unsuspected subatomic particles, and even antimatter.

The journey from prediction to proof transports us from seats of learning in Paris and Cambridge to the war-torn Russian front, to bunkers beneath nuclear reactors, observatories in Berlin and California, and huge tunnels under the Swiss– French border. From electromagnetism to Einstein’s gravitational waves to the elusive neutrino, Marcus Chown takes us on a breathtaking, mind-altering tour of the major breakthroughs of modern physics and highlights science’s central mystery: its astonishing predictive power.

Marcus Chown is an award-winning science writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is now cosmology consultant for the New Scientist. He is the author of Solar System for iPad, which won a Bookseller Award for Digital Innovation. His acclaimed books include What a Wonderful World, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, We Need to Talk about Kelvin and The Ascent of Gravity, which was a Sunday Times Science Book of the Year.

This is a free event, but please do register if you plan on attending. This event will be held in our Philosophy Department, which is accessible via a small flight of stairs. Seating is unallocated, so please arrive early if you would like a chair. For more information, please contact our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

Join us as we hear from Prof Martin Bureau (University of Oxford) about his research on Supermassive black holes.

‘Supermassive black holes are now known to lurk at the centre of most
galaxies. They are also believed to play a key role in the evolution
of galaxies, by regulating the supply of the gas necessary to form
stars. Here, I will present key results from the mm-Wave
Interferometric Survey of Dark Object Masses (WISDOM), a high
resolution survey of molecular gas in galaxy nuclei. I will first show
that carbon monoxide (CO) can be used to easily and accurately measure
the mass of these supermassive black holes. I will then discuss
substantial ongoing efforts to do this, and present many new
spectacular measurements from the Atacama Large
Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA), the largest ground-based
telescope project. This effort opens the way to literally hundreds of
measurements across galaxies of all morphological types, both active
and non-active, with a unique method. It thus promises to
revolutionise our understanding of the co-evolution of galaxies and
black holes.’

FREE entry

Drinks and snacks provided. (Non-alcoholic and vegetarian/vegan dietary requirements provided for. For other diets please get in touch in advance)

For more information email emil.ostergaard@stcatz.ox.ac.uk. There is wheelchair access. There is padded seating, and an accessible toilet. There is blue badge parking by request at the event.

Blake Gopnik’s definitive biography digs deep into the radical genius of Andy Warhol. Based on years of archival research and on interviews with hundreds of Warhol’s surviving friends, lovers and enemies, Warhol traces the artist’s path from his modest origins in Pittsburgh and first success as an illustrator, to his ground-breaking pivot into Pop Art in the 1960s, to the society portraiture and popular celebrity that became his hallmarks in the ’70s and ’80s. He overcame the vicious homophobia of his youth to become a symbol of gay achievement, while always seeking the pleasures of traditional romance and coupledom. (Warhol explodes the myth of his asexuality.) Despite being burdened with an almost crippling shyness, Warhol sought out all the most notable figures of his times – Susan Sontag, Mick Jagger, the Rothschilds. Filled with new insights into the artist’s work and personality, Warhol asks: Was he a joke or a genius, a radical or a social climber? As Warhol himself would have answered: Yes.

Please note that this event has been cancelled.

Join novelist Sarah Moss and historian Sarah Knott in conversation with critic Merve Emre.

A conversation about life-writing and the Lives of Houses. With Hermione Lee, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.

An exploration of the work of prolific writer Jenny Diski, with a keynote lecture from Blake Morrison.

In this talk Natasha Randall explores the task of biographical research into the figure of the literary translator Constance Garnett. Translators notionally produce non-original text but are there aspects of their work, their semantic tendencies perhaps, that can expose something of their personal nature, or their lived experience? Garnett brought seventy volumes of Russian literature to English readers over the course of her lifetime, often first translations, and yet her existing letters and diaries betray relatively little of her interior life. Can her translations provide additional insight into her life and character? What are the detectable choices in Garnett’s work that can contribute to a portrait of her?

Natasha Randall is a literary translator of the works of Dostoyevsky, Zamyatin, Gogol, and others, for publishers such as Penguin Classics, Canongate’s Canon, and the Modern Library. Her writing and critical work has appeared in theTimes Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Moscow Times, BookForum, The New York Times, Strad magazine, The Yale Review, Jubilat, and on National Public Radio. She is a contributing editor to the New York-based literary magazine A Public Space. Her novel, Love Orange, about modern anxieties and opioid addiction, was published in September by riverrun (Quercus).

Expert in globalisation and development, Professor Ian Goldin uses state-of-the-art maps to show humanity’s impact on the planet and demonstrate how we can save it and thrive as a species.

Professor Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalisation and Development at Oxford University, has traced the paths of peoples, cities, wars, climates and technologies on a global scale in his new book Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years, which he co-authored with Robert Muggah.

In this book talk he will demonstrate the impact of climate change and rises in sea level on cities around the world, the truth about immigration, the future of population growth, trends in health and education, and the realities of inequality and how to end it.

To register and watch live: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/terra-incognita

The talk will also be streamed via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMhLn7C7o3g

Lt. Major Cecilia Diaconeasa was a Cold War secret police informant who in March 1983, several weeks after the birth of her baby daughter, was assigned to extract confessions from a woman suspected of collaborating in a public political protest, and to prevent her from committing ‘unthinkable acts’. Her ‘target,’ my mother, was under arrest in the infectious ward of the district’s children’s hospital with her own new born son, who was struggling for his life. The talk will discuss working with Cold War surveillance family archives and the process of getting inside the Lt.’s mind, in order to understand the narrative of oppression. In the course of locating the appropriate form which could transform the historical documents and the life experiences into literature, I found myself asking deeper questions about what constitutes literary language.

Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Lilies from America, a Poetry Society Special Commendation. Her memoir, Burying the Typewriter, called by the Sunday Times ‘a modern classic,’ won the Bread Loaf Nonfiction Prize and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her poems have been anthologized in the Penguin’s Poems for Life and Joining Music with Reason among others, and her work has been translated into several languages. She wrote a monograph on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile and reviews regularly for Harvard Review Online. Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan and teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in Manhattan. She appears on current affairs and history programmes on the BBC, NPR, Monocle, and ABC. Bugan has a DPhil in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University. Her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2021.

We are justified to say that we are living through a new age of globalisation, which Professor Jeff Sachs calls the Digital Age. The hugely disruptive changes were already with us before Covid-19, but now we’ve been hurled head-first into the new age.

It is marked by enormous geopolitical, technological, and environmental disruptions, posing great risks as well as opportunities. To understand the Digital Age better, it is enormously valuable to gain a historical perspective.

Professor Jeff Sachs’ new book The Ages of Globalization and this talk, explores the interactions of technology, geography, and institutions throughout human history, describing seven ages of globalisation and the nature of societal change from one age to the next.

To register and watch this talk live and participate in the Q & A: www.crowdcast.io/e/The-ages-of-globalisation

To watch later: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc3AY17_Lxs

This is the Weinrebe Lecture in Life-Writing for Michaelmas Term 2020.

Hermione Lee, whose biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber on 1 October, talks about his life and work, and the challenges for a biographer in writing the life of a living subject.

With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg, Hermione Lee has built a meticulously researched portrait of one of our greatest playwrights. Drawing on several years of long, exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself, it tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he’s ever lived in, every piece of writing he’s ever done, and every play and film he’s ever worked on. This is the revealing story of a very public and very private man.

Hermione Lee was the President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017, and is the founder and advisory director of OCLW. She held the Goldsmiths’ Chair of English Literature at Oxford from 1998 to 2008, and before that taught at the Universities of Liverpool and York. Her work includes acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2007) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography). She has also published books on Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Philip Roth, and she has written about life-writing, in Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (2005), Biography: A Very Short Introduction (2009), and, co-edited with Kate Kennedy, in a collection based on an OCLW conference, called Lives of Houses (2020). Her biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber in October 2020. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature (where she serves on the Council) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literature.

The video of this Weinrebe Lecture in Life-Writing will be available for 24 hours only.

Come along to the long-awaited Night Sky Show at the fantastic Great Hall in Cholsey. It will certainly be a night to remember!

Facts, fiction, laughter and more in a fantastic place, for one night only. A night of great entertainment as well as an event for everyone!

SHOW DESCRIPTION

The Cholsey Night Sky Show will take you on an epic journey. Certainly a very unique and different journey! From our celestial back yard and across the cosmos.

Comedy, astronomy and so much more. Above all, an evening for anyone with a slight interest in the night sky or more. A night for anyone who indeed wants to laugh, learn, be inspired and enjoy.

The Night Sky Show will be a truly fun, entertaining and memorable evening. Helping you understand and enjoy the heavens above and the universe beyond. Helpful for the next time you’re looking up at the night sky stargazing, or when you just look up and wonder.

For one thing, we’ll skip the heavy going science and hard to follow explanations. The Universe and everything within will be presented in an entertaining and easily absorbed way.

AN AMAZING SHOW FOR EVERYONE

This won’t be a boring astronomy talk. The Night Sky Show is a theatrical performance anyone can enjoy! Learn about constellations, stars, planets and the deeper cosmos. The sheer scale of the universe. The mythology and stories of the night sky.

Presented by Adrian West – A passionate and experienced astronomer. Better known as VirtualAstro on Twitter and Facebook. One of the largest independent astronomy and space accounts on social media. He’s passionate about the night sky and inspiring people to look up. His success is due to being interesting, down-to-earth and fun! The writer of numerous astronomy and space-related articles for various popular online science magazines. He has also written guides and articles for the BBC, Met Office and National Trust to name a few. You can regularly find him pointing out things to people in the night sky.

If you look up and wonder, The Night Sky Show is for you. www.nightskyshow.co.uk

SO LET’S EXPLORE!
Suitable for ages 8+ Fully licenced bar.

In her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy, the Dunblane Primary School shooting.

Through poems about landscape and loss, the poems in her third collection, Return by Minor Road (Bloodaxe), explore the lasting impact of being an ‘incoherent bystander’ at such a tragedy.

Through rivers, rain, wildlife and landscape, Williamson revisits where ‘the occasional endures’ and discovers the healing properties of a beloved place:

‘These small movements
towards the bracken
are to be reckoned with.’

—

Heidi Williamson is a poet, writing tutor and mentor, and an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund. She studied poetry and prose at the UEA and regularly teaches for arts and literature organisations in the UK.

Her work has appeared in literary journals in the UK, America and Australia and been translated into Polish, German, and Turkish. It has inspired poetry and science discussions in schools and adult creative writing groups, and has featured in NHS waiting rooms, cafés, and at science and literary festivals in the UK and abroad.

Her first collection, Electric Shadow, was supported by a grant from Arts Council England and was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry.

Her second collection was inspired by being a printer’s daughter. The Print Museum received the EAW Book by the Cover’ Award and the 2016 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry.

With a rootless lily held in front of him, a poem from her latest collection, won the 2019 Plough Prize.

Following her Research Forum talk in Trinity 2020, ‘The Elusive Subject: Biographies of Exiles’ Soledad Fox Maura returns to the OCLW programme for the launch of her first novel, Madrid Again (Simon & Schuster), in conversation with Hannie Lawlor. Told with humor, candor, and grit, Madrid Again is a highly original novel, and an homage to the haunting power of history, and how it shapes the identity of two generations of women.

Soledad Fox Maura is the V-Nee Yeh ‘81 Professor at Williams College. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She has written two biographies that have been published in English, Spanish, and French. The first one is about Constancia de la Mora, aka one of the Spanish “Mitford Sisters” who rebelled against her wealthy and conservative upbringing to become a one-woman anti-Fascist force during the Spanish Civil War; and the second about Jorge Semprún, who fought in the French Resistance, survived Buchenwald, and went on to become a serial autobiographer, auto-fiction writer, and Oscar nominee for two screenplays. At the moment she is preparing editions of memoirs written by two Spanish women in exile, and working on a collection of biographical essays about American collectors, soldiers, writers, artists, and impresarios, and politicians in 20th century Spain.

Join Peter Drobac as he interviews Paul Farmer, in an exploration of the lessons we can learn from Paul Farmer’s phenomenal new book, Fevers, feuds and diamonds: Ebola and the ravages of history.

We will reflect on how these lessons can help us tackle the current Covid-19 pandemic and discuss how inequality and exploitation fuelled the spread of a deadly virus and how we might finally learn from history, in order to build a healthier, more equitable world.

For more details, visit https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/events/fevers-feuds-and-diamonds-dr-paul-farmer-future-global-health

Join us live or watch the recording on: https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/oxford-answers

This event and open to all Registration not required.