Maureen Freely, the author of six novels – Mother’s Helper (1979), The Life of the Party (1985), The Stork Club (1992), Under the Vulcania (1994), The Other Rebecca (1996) and Enlightenment (2007) – will be giving a public reading of her works at the Aula Magna on Friday.

Ms Freely 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.

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, and 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.

• The reading starts at 6 p.m. A limited number of books by Ms Freely will also be available.