Rachel Cusk, slight with a soft brown fringe and grey trainers, looks calmly out on the audience when greeted with applause. She speaks with deliberation in a low voice, as though confident that whatever she puts forward will be interesting to her listeners. She is right. Philip Langeskov opens by talking about the vicious reception Cusk’s memoir…
I remember that Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers was the first book that I read when I came to UEA. As a literature student, I am often encouraged to take literary analysis further than what a book makes me feel. But I so vividly remember how Grief made me feel. It is…
The Spring Literary festival most recently saw Jean McNeil in conversation with John Boyne, the award winning writer known for novels such as The Boy in Stripped Pyjamas and The Heart’s Invisible Furies. Director of the festival, Philip Langeskov, starts off the event by giving a warm welcome to Boyne, who returns to UEA after…
Canadian-born writer Rachel Cusk’s controversial memoirs about motherhood and divorce, together with the recent Outline-trilogy, have made it so that writers and critics often couples her name with the term autofiction. Although she herself does not use that term to describe her body of work, it is undoubtedly part of the recent surge of literature…
Wednesday 20th February will see The Literary Festival entertaining Tessa Hadley, whose latest novel, Late in the Day, which tells the story of four friends in their fifties, and the turn their lives take after one of them dies after a sudden heart attack. It invokes a discussion of ageing, love, and a longing for…
Making her return to UEA for the first time in six years, Tracey Thorn will be getting this year’s Spring Literary Festival underway, coinciding with the release of her second memoir: Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia. On finding out that Thorn was making a return to the UEA Literary Festival, I was more than…
The fourth event in 2015’s Spring Literary Festival began with an introduction from UEA’s Philp Langeskov which summarised Ali Smith and her writing perfectly. An author who refuses to conform to genre and expectation, winner of the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa novel of the year award and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, she…
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