Recent speakers have included John Banville, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Tracy Chevalier, Michael Frayn, Germaine Greer, Nigella Lawson, Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith, Wole Soyinka and Rory Stewart.

Monday 11 February 2008
Taboo topics — George Steiner
Chair: Marina Warner

In the half century since his first book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, appeared, George Steiner’s output has been so prodigious and so wide-ranging that it is a surprise to discover that there are subjects he has found himself unable to tackle. Marking the publication of My Unwritten Books, he talks about seven taboo topics he has avoided writing about: because they brought too much pain; because they presented too great an emotional or intellectual challenge; or because the intimacies or indiscretions they involved proved too threatening. The themes range from the torment of the gifted when they live among the truly great, to the experience of sex in different languages; from a love for animals greater than for human beings, to a theology of emptiness. Underlying them all is the perception that the very best a writer can produce is the tip of the iceberg; that behind every good book lies the book which remains unwritten.

We are grateful to the Royal Literary Fund for sponsoring this lecture.

Monday 3 March 2008
The T.S. Eliot Memorial meeting
Conversations with the natural world — Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie
Chair: Piers Plowright

Rooted at opposite ends of Britain – one in Devon, the other in Fife – Alice Oswald and Kathleen Jamie have much in common. Still in their early forties, both have combined motherhood, and very private lives, with extraordinary success as poets. Alice Oswald has won not only the T.S. Eliot Prize but also the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, while Kathleen Jamie is one of only two poets to have won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize twice. Both have won the Forward Poetry Prize. Each of them combines an intense love for, and close attention to, nature, with imagery that is at once precise, and utterly new - for Alice Oswald, eels in the river Dart are ‘bright whips of flow’, for Kathleen Jamie, a corncrake is ‘a votive statue hidden in the grass’. And while Jeanette Winterson describes Alice Oswald as ‘the rightful heir to Ted Hughes’, Richard Mabey considers Kathleen Jamie’s work ‘as close as writing gets to a conversation with the natural world’. Long-standing admirers of one another’s work, they meet, and read together, for the first time.

Friday 4 April 2008
Joint event with the Oxford Literary Festival, at Christ Church, Oxford, 6pm
University: the wrong start for a writer? — Michael Holroyd, Maggie Gee
Chair: David Dabydeen

If you want to become a writer, should you read English at university? Or can the study of literature actually prevent you from finding your own voice? Biographer Michael Holroyd, President of the Royal Society of Literature, and recently knighted for services to literature, never went to university, and claims to have received his education in Maidenhead Public Library. Maggie Gee, novelist and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature from 2004 until 2008, read English at Somerville College, Oxford, and went on to do research degrees – but came to find academic writing increasingly burdensome. They argue the case for and against university, and ask whether, with the explosion of creative writing courses in universities all over the UK, people can really be taught to write. David Dabydeen, critic, writer, novelist, poet and director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick, chairs the discussion.

For other Oxford Literary Festival events, please visit www.sundaytimes-oxfordliteraryfestival.co.uk.

Monday 14 April 2008
Translating Russia — Dmitry Bykov, Angela Livingstone, Jon Stallworthy
Chair: Elaine Feinstein

Russia’s novelists have enriched English literature from the first translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky onwards, and our knowledge of twentieth-century Russia has been ennobled by understanding the courage of its great poets. To mark the fiftieth anniversary both of the Translators’ Association, and of the first English translation of Dr Zhivago, Dmitry Bykov, visiting from Moscow, introduces his fascinating new biography of Boris Pasternak, and Professors Jon Stallworthy and Angela Livingstone speak about their own involvement with Pasternak over many years. Elaine Feinstein, whose new novel, The Russian Jerusalem, includes Boris Pasternak as a character, takes the Chair.

We are grateful to Academia Rossica for sponsoring this event.

Monday 12 May 2008
The Ian Fleming Centenary Lecture
Licensed to kill? — Daphne Park, with readings by Lucy Fleming
Chair: Alan Judd

Daphne Park does not look like James Bond – in fact her beady cosiness is more reminiscent of Miss Marple – but she was the true face of British Intelligence for the second half of the twentieth century. She served in the SOE during the Second World War, in Moscow during the Cold War, and in Hanoi during the Vietnam conflict. She smuggled men out of the Congo in the boot of her car (not an Aston Martin, but a 2CV), and became a senior controller for MI6, before moving on to become Principal of Somerville College, Oxford. Created Baroness Park of Monmouth in 1990, she insists that intelligence work is less about glamorous derring-do than about ‘knowing human beings’. So, how real was James Bond? In a discussion to mark the centenary of the birth of Ian Fleming, interspersed with readings from his work by his niece, the actress Lucy Fleming, Lady Park talks to diplomat Alan Judd, author of the authorised life of Mansfield Cumming, founder of MI6, and of the spy novel Legacy.

For other events to mark Ian Fleming’s centenary, please visit www.ianflemingcentenary.com.

Wednesday 14 May 2008
Joint meeting: Royal Society of Literature/University of Warwick
Swimming against the tide — Gao Xingjian
Chair: David Dabydeen

Writer, playwright and dissident, Gao Xingjian became, in 2000, the only Chinese writer ever to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize committee praised ‘an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama’, but as his work had been banned in China since 1989, the award divided the Chinese community. Born in the Jiangxi province of Eastern China in 1940, Gao grew up in the aftermath of the Japanese invasion of China. During the Cultural Revolution, he was forced to destroy all his early writing – a trunk full of manuscripts, articles and 15 plays – and was sent to the country for ‘rehabilitation’. He continued to write, however, and in 1983 his play Bus Stop was banned by the Chinese government as ‘the most poisonous play written since 1949’. After his work The Other Shore was banned by Chinese authorities in 1986, he sought asylum as a political refugee in Paris, and in 1998 he became a French citizen. He talks to David Dabydeen about exile, the supreme importance of the individual, and his belief that ‘literature in higher than politics’.

This meeting will take place at the Arts Centre, University of Warwick. If you would like tickets, or further information, please telephone Maggie Fergusson on 020 7845 4676, or email info@rslit.org

Monday 16 June 2008
The Roy Jenkins Memorial Lecture
Pitt and Wilberforce: contrasting friends — William Hague
Chair: Anne Chisholm

Since resigning as the youngest-ever Leader of the Conservative Party, in 2001, William Hague has combined his continued work as the MP for Richmond (Yorkshire), with the publication of two historical biographies. In the first, William Pitt the Younger, he explored a subject for whom he had an obvious sympathy: William Pitt had, at 24, become the youngest Prime Minister this country has ever known. He then moved on to tackle, in time for last year’s bi-centenary of the abolition of slavery, the life of Pitt’s friend and ally William Wilberforce, the orator and campaigner who shunned all honours, titles and ministerial positions, and yet became one of the most influential politicians in British history. William Hague, now Shadow Foreign Secretary, examines the friendship and contrast between these two remarkable politicians in a talk that promises to be both masterly and riveting – for, as the Sunday Times has noted, ‘he has that commendable gift of the professional politician: unerring ability to retain the attention of his audience.’

Programme download

Download the meetings programme in pdf format.

All meetings begin at 7pm. They are held in the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, Somerset House, Strand, WC2. Turn in to Somerset House from the Strand. While still under the entrance archway, go in through the last double doors on the left.

The nearest tube stations are Holborn, Covent Garden, Charing Cross and Temple

Bus routes passing close to Somerset House:
1, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 23, 26, 59, 68, 76, 77a, 91, 139, 168, 171, 172, 176, 188, 243 and 341