Three acclaimed British writers will be participating in a seminar called ‘Writing Spaces’ on Saturday.
What are the spaces that writers occupy and explore in their work? Writers interpret physical space, as well as intellectual and psychological space, identity, language and literary traditions.
Patricia Duncker, Maureen Freely, and Simon Mawer will join Maltese writers and publishers in an informal setting. The discussions will focus on literary translation, publishing and editing, the writing process, and place, history and the novel.
Other participants include Petra Bianchi, Ivan Callus, Dominic Fenech, Adrian Grima, Chris Gruppetta, Gloria Lauri Lucente and Clare Thake Vassallo.
The seminar will take place at the University of Malta’s Valletta Campus (Old University Building) in St Paul’s Street, Valletta from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The registration fee is €10. For further information, contact michelle.sammut@um.edu.mt or mt.information@britishcouncil.org, or call 2340 3082 or 9949 3003.
Freely will also be giving a public reading at the Aula Magna, University of Malta, Valletta Campus on Friday at 6 p.m.
A limited number of books by Freely, who will participate in a book-signing session at the end of the evening, will be available at the venue. There will be refreshments after the reading.
The event is free.
Both events are organised by the Faculty of Arts, University of Malta, together with the British Council.
Simon Mawer
Simon Mawer was born in 1948 and spent his childhood in England, Cyprus and Malta. He studied zoology at Brasenose College, Oxford, and has had a career as a biology teacher.
His latest novel The Glass Room (2009) was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Wingate Prize.
Mawer’s first novel Chimera (1989) won the McKitterick Prize, and his novel Mendel’s Dwarf, based around the life of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, and the modern day experiences of his great-great-great nephew, was shortlisted for the 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
His novel Swimming to Ithaca (2006) is partly inspired by his childhood on Cyprus, and The Gospel of Judas (2000) is a literary suspense thriller revolving around the discovery of a lost papyrus scroll near the Dead Sea, and is partly set in Italy.
The Fall (2003) is set in the world of British rock-climbing in the early 1970s and won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountaineering Literature the same year.
Patricia Duncker
Patricia Duncker was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on June 29, 1951. From 1993 to 2002 she taught literature at the University of Aberystwyth, and from 2002 to 2006 she was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, teaching the MA in Prose Fiction. In 2007 she moved to the University of Manchester where she is Professor of Modern Literature.
Duncker’s most recent novel is The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (2010). She has won several awards for her work, including the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize for her first novel Hallucinating Foucault (1996).
The narrative is set mainly in France and centres on a Ph.D. student’s obsessive search for his subject, the (fictional) French writer Paul Michel.
Her novel Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees (1997), a collection of short stories exploring themes of desire, jealousy and revenge, was shortlisted for the Pen/Macmillan Silver Pen Award.
Maureen Freely
Maureen Freely was born in the US but grew up in Turkey, where her family still lives. She was educated at Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and has made her home in England for the past 25 years.
Now a Professor at the University of Warwick, she is perhaps best known for her translations of Snow, The Black Book, Istanbul: Memories of a City, Other Colours, and Museum of Innocence, all by the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.
Freely is the author of six novels, including The Other Rebecca (1996) and Enlightenment (2007). She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for two decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing.
She is known for her campaigning journalism after Pamuk and an estimated 80 other writers were prosecuted (and in the case of Hrant Dink, assassinated) for insulting Turkishness, state institutions, or the memory of Ataturk.