Spring 2012 | Public lectures and events | Audio and pdf

Contributor(s): Rolando Bompadre, Matías Néspolo | As tense as a thriller, as vivid as an undercover documentary, Matías Néspolo’s first novel, Seven Ways to Kill a Cat, examines a place of crime and deprivation. Set in Buenos Aires at the time of Argentina’s financial crash, and seen through the eyes of twenty-year-old Gringo, it tells the story of two boys on the cusp of adulthood who have no choice but to join the gang warfare that rules their community. While its depiction of Buenos Aires rings true in every detail, the barrio could be any place of urban deprivation. With fellow argentine author, Rolando Bompadre, he will discuss society and politics in Latin American literature. Rolando Bompadre teaches Spanish and Italian at the University of Aberdeen, and is author of La víspera de los asesinatos, which was among the finalists of the 1st Premio Tusquets Editores de Novela. Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Spanish and Latin American fiction. She has translated Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion and Enrique Vila-Matas’ latest novel Dublinesque with Anne McLean, and her translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’ Down the Rabbit Hole has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. In autumn last year she was one of the first translators in residence at the Free Word Centre. Born in Buenos Aires in 1975, Matías Néspolo studied literature, going on to write poems, short stories, journalism and then Seven Ways to Kill a Cat, his acclaimed first novel. He has been living in Barcelona since 2001 and, in 2010, was selected by Granta as one of their best young contemporary Spanish-language novelists. Seven Ways to Kill a Cat is recommended by English Pen.

Contributor(s): John Lanchester | In his latest state-of-the-nation novel, Capital, John Lanchester tells the story of an ordinary street in the capital, but also of a global crisis. In this conversation with Hay Festival chair Revel Guest, he will discuss the power of a fictional handling of the financial crisis in comparison to non-fictional accounts. John Lanchester is the author of The Debt to Pleasure (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award), Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour, a Sunday Times bestseller, and his work has been translated into 21 languages. His memoir Family Romance was published in 2007 to great acclaim. And his non-fiction work Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-One Can Pay about the financial crisis was a bestseller both in the UK and the US. He is a contributor to the Guardian and the New Yorker as well as a Contributing Editor to the London Review of Books.

Contributor(s): Michael Rosen, Emma-Louise Williams, Lasse Johansson, Andrea Luka Zimmerman | Emma-Louise William’s film, Under the Cranes (2011), is based on the documentary play for voices, Hackney Streets, by poet and former Children's Laureate, Michael Rosen. Blending rare archive footage and dreamlike sequences of present-day Hackney, Williams links the everyday with the social and literary history of this dynamic and culturally diverse East London borough. Following the screening, a panel of speakers will join Williams and Rosen to discuss the hybridity of literature and film, as well as Hackney and the increasing attention it has received in light of the 2012 Olympics and controversial redevelopment projects. Michael Rosen was born in 1946 in north London. He has been writing, performing, broadcasting and lecturing since the early 70s. He co-devised and co-teaches a Masters course at Birkbeck College, University of London. Emma-Louise Williams is a radio producer and first-time film-maker. She is currently making a radio documentary for BBC Radio 4 about unaccompanied, asylum-seeking children and young people in East London. Her work seeks to counter the prevailing perception of the inner city as a site of failure, ugliness and misdeed through a ‘socio-poetics’ of everyday life. Lasse Johansson and Andrea Luka Zimmerman are artists/filmmakers working in East London for Fugitive Images.

Contributor(s): Horatio Clare, Dr Alex Gillespie, Abigail King | This panel will discuss the relationship between perceptions and realities of travel, and the influence of travel literature and photography on tourist experiences. Horatio Clare is an award-winning author, broadcaster, novelist and journalist. In 2008 he journeyed from South Africa to South Wales following migrating swallows, a journey he wrote about in A Single Swallow. His latest expedition took him from Felixstowe to Los Angeles on a 150,000 tonne container ship. Horatio writes regularly for Conde Nast Traveller and various national newspapers. Alex Gillespie is a Lecturer in Social Psychology at LSE and Co-Editor of Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. He has over fifty publications, including three books. He is interested in tourism and tourist photography as an encounter with the other saturated in fantasy. Abigail King is an experienced journalist and photographer who writes about travel for both print and online media. She has circled the globe twice, camped in the snows of Kilimanjaro and Patagonia and tracked down tigers, turtles and panda bears. She’s then had a hot shower and embraced the city life of New York, Rio, Paris and Tokyo.

Contributor(s): Richard Holloway, Alex Preston | The former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway's memoir, Leaving Alexandria, recounts a life defined by the struggle between public faith and private doubt. Alex Preston’s latest novel, The Revelations, portrays the power of a religious movement amongst a group of young people, exploring why people still need faith in a secular era, and the battle between belief and doubt. Together they will discuss the place of faith, doubt and certainty in our secular modern age. Richard Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. A former Gresham Professor of Divinity and Chairman of the Joint Board of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has written for many newspapers in Britain, including The Times, Guardian, Observer, Herald and the Scotsman. He has also presented many series for BBC television and radio; his new series, on doubt, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this spring. Alex Preston was born in 1979 and lives with his family in London. His first novel, the bestselling This Bleeding City, won the Edinburgh festival Reader’s First Book awards and the Spear’s First Book Award, and has been translated into twelve languages. Preston writes and reviews for the New Statesman and the Observer and is a regular panellist on BBC2’s The Review Show.

Contributor(s): Marina Lewycka, Jeremy Sams, George Szirtes | A panel of experts discuss translation and storytelling in novels, poetry and opera. Are there fundamental elements to storytelling that are shared across cultures, languages and genres? What is lost, and what is created, in translation? Followed by a reading of the winning entry in the LSE micro-fiction student competition and a performance by students of a classic one act play. Marina Lewycka was born in a refugee camp in Germany in 1946 and moved to England with her family when she was about a year old. She spent most of her life since then trying to become a writer, and finally succeeded in 2005 with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian which has sold more than a million copies in the UK alone. This was followed by Two Caravans in March 2007 and We Are All Made of Glue in July 2009. Her latest novel is Various Pets Alive and Dead. Jeremy Sams is a translator of opera libretti as well as a lyricist, theatre director, composer, orchestrator and musical director. His latest work, The Enchanted Island, recently opened to critical acclaim at the New York Metropolitan Opera. His many translations include Mozart’s Figaro’s Wedding, La Boheme, The Magic Flute and Wagner’s The Ring Cycle (English National Opera); The Merry Widow (Covent Garden); and Les Parents Terribles, The Miser and Mary Stuart (Royal National Theatre). His film scores have won awards from BAFTA (Persuasion) and Ivor Novello (Enduring Love). As a theatre director his credits include Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Sound of Music (Palladium), Noises Off (West End and Broadway) and The Wind in the Willows (Old Vic). George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England as a refugee in 1956, following the Hungarian Uprising. He has published some thirteen books of poetry in English, most recently Reel (2004), New and Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books (2009). These have won the Faber Prize, the Cholmondeley Award and, most recently the T S Eliot Prize. As a translator from Hungarian he has published and edited several books of prize-winning poetry and fiction. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches at UEA.

Contributor(s): Lord Hurd, Sam Leith, Ian Leslie, Jonathan Powell | This distinguished panel will discuss the importance of rhetoric, that famous art of persuasion, as well as the centrality of lying and self-deception to human society and politics. Lord Hurd retired as Foreign Secretary in July 1995, after a distinguished career in Government spanning sixteen years. He served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 1984 - 85, Home Secretary from 1985 - 89 and Foreign Secretary 1989 – 1995 in the Governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. After joining the Diplomatic Service, he went on to serve at the Foreign office in Peking, New York (UN) and Rome. He ran Edward Heath’s private office from 1968 - 70 and acted as his Political Secretary at 10 Downing Street from 1970 - 74. He was MP for Mid-Oxfordshire (later Witney) from 1974 to 1997. He was created a Life Peer in 1997, and has since held numerous appointments in the City and in public life. He was Deputy Chairman of Coutts Bank until the end of 2009. Lord Hurd has written ten political novels. His memoirs were published in October 2003. His biography of the life of Sir Robert Peel was published in 2007. His latest book on eleven British Foreign Secretaries was published in 2010 and he is now at work with Edward Young on a biography of Disraeli. Sam Leith is a former Literary Editor of the Daily Telegraph, and contributes regularly to the Evening Standard, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Spectator and Prospect. He’s the author of two non-fiction books, Dead Pets and Sod's Law and a novel, The Coincidence Engine. His latest book You Talkin’ To Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama is published by Profile Books. Ian Leslie combines careers in advertising and writing. His latest book, entitled Born Liars: Why We Can't Live Without Deceit is about the surprising centrality of lying and self-deception to human society. After studying history at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, Jonathan Powell worked for the BBC and Granada TV before joining the Foreign Office in 1979. In 1994 Mr Blair, then Leader of the Opposition, poached him to join his `kitchen cabinet' as his Chief of Staff. When Labour achieved its landslide victory in 1997 Powell was at the heart of the Downing Street machine. He was the only senior member of staff to remain at Blair's side throughout his time at the top of British politics. He is author of The New Machiavelli: How to wield power in the Modern World. Jenni Russell is a political columnist for the Evening Standard and the Sunday Times. She won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 2011.

Contributor(s): Sarah Salway | Using social media means it has never been easier to get your words out there, but how can you be sure you are being read? Sarah Salway uses personal experience and practical examples to show how you can make the internet work best for you, including getting an audience and writing for personal websites, blogs, podcasts, Facebook pages, and Twitter streams. Canterbury Laureate and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the LSE, Sarah Salway has been blogging successfully since 2004. She is the author of three novels, including Something Beginning With, and a collection of short stories. Her first poetry collection, You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book, will be published in March. Her website is at www.sarahsalway.net.

Contributor(s): Professor Mark Pagel | Since humans left Africa less than a hundred thousand years ago there has been a staggering explosion of cultures. What caused this blooming of diversity? Why are there so many mutually incomprehensible languages, even within small territories? Why do we rejoice in rituals, wrap ourselves in flags, or define ourselves in opposition to others? Humans are usually seen as differing from other animals because of our inherent traits of consciousness, language and intelligence. But Pagel shows we've had it the wrong way round. Many of these things would not exist without our propensity for culture - our ability to co-operate in small tribal societies, to pass on beliefs and practices and to accumulate knowledge over generations - so that we prospered while others declined. Pagel's extraordinary history of the role of culture in natural selection shows how humans acquired a mind that is hardwired for culture. Our cultures – although an accident of birth - have outstripped our genes in determining who we are, how we think and speak, and who we love and kill. Weaving together evolutionary biology, anthropology, natural history, philosophy and Pagel's years of observing human behaviour around the globe, this book sheds light on everything from art, morality and affection to jealousy, self-interest and prejudice, and asks whether our cultural legacy equips us for the challenges of life in the modern world. Wired for Culture will change how we view ourselves, not just as individuals, but within the wider story of our species. Mark Pagel is head of the Evolution Laboratory in the Division of Zoology, School of Biological Sciences, at the University of Reading, and an External Professor at the renowned Santa Fe Institute. He has travelled the world studying evolution and the spread of cultures from the Chalbi Desert in Kenya to Tanzania and Zanzibar, and remote Oceania. He is the editor-in-chief of the award winning Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution and co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology, which is regarded as a classic, as well as the author of articles in Science, Nature, and other journals. Statistical methods that Pagel has developed are used by researchers all over the world to study evolutionary trends across species. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society. This event marks the publication of his latest book, Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation.

Contributor(s): Reshma Ruia | Reshma Ruia was born in India and grew up in Rome, Italy. After an undergraduate degree in International Relations and post graduate degree in Economic History from LSE, she moved back to Rome where she worked as a development economist with the United Nations and subsequently with the OECD in Paris. She is now based in Manchester, where she obtained an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester University. She is the author of Something Black in the Lentil Soup, described by John Carey in the Times, as a ‘gem of straight-faced comedy.’ One of her short stories has appeared in the Anthology, Too Asian, not Asian Enough. She has recently completed a PhD in Creative Writing from Manchester University and has finished her second novel, A Mouthful of Silence. In this session she will discuss the ways of writing about different cultures- the importance of plot, portrayal of character and narrative voice- as well as what her transition from academic, social scientific culture to a literary one has meant for her writing.