With Guy Gunaratne, Xiaolu Guo and Howard Jacobson
In their moving recent novels Guy Gunaratne (In Our Mad and Furious City), Xiaolu Guo (A Lover’s Discourse) and Howard Jacobson (Live a Little) explore lives and deaths that are powerfully shaped by locales. Join these celebrated London-based writers for a discussion of why ‘place’ is so much more than ‘setting’ in their writing and the approach they each take to creating characters and narratives that tell London’s as well as Londoners’ stories. Chaired by Nadia Valman, who teaches urban literature at Queen Mary, University of London.
Contributors
Guy Gunaratne
Guy Gunaratne lives between London, UK and Malmö, Sweden. His first novel In Our Mad and Furious City was the winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize as well as the Authors Club Best First Novel Award in 2019. It was also longlisted for the Booker Prize as well as the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, Gordon Burn Prize and Writers Guild Awards in 2018. Appointed Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts – Trinity College, Cambridge (2019 - 2021).
Xiaolu Guo
Xiaolu Guo is a British/Chinese novelist, essayist and filmmaker. Her latest novel is A Lover’s Discourse. She is also the author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction), Village of Stone, and I Am China. Her recent memoir Once Upon A Time In The East was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Award, the Folio Prize and the Costa Award, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2017. She was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. She has also directed several feature films, including How Is Your Fish Today, UFO In Her Eyes and She, A Chinese. She teaches creative writing in London and film-making in Berlin.
Howard Jacobson
Howard Jacobson FRSL was born in Manchester and studied English at Downing College, Cambridge. He is the author of sixteen novels and and six works of non-fiction. He won the Man-Booker Prize for The Finkler Question in 2010 and was shortlisted again in 2014 for J. He has twice won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. His new novel Live a Little has just been published in paperback. He is an Honorary Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and Visiting Professor at New College of the Humanities, London.
Chair
Dr Nadia Valman
Nadia Valman is Reader in English Literature at Queen Mary, University of London where she leads the English department’s new flagship first-year course, ‘London Global’. She is the author or editor of nine books on British Jewish cultural history and the creator of the walking tour app Zangwill’s Spitalfields (2016), a journey through Spitalfields at the time of mass Jewish immigration to London in the 1880s using contemporary documents and literature. She is currently researching the literature of London.
P is for place
Guy Gunaratne
Xiaolu Guo
© Stephen Barker
Howard Jacobson
Dr Nadia Valman
