Who Owns a Life? Literary Biography Today
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from 07:30 PM to 08:30 PM
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Hermione Lee chairs a panel of literary biographers including Martin Stannard, Jeremy Treglown and Alexander Waugh who will discuss the ethical issues of writing biography and the problems of using copyright material.
Martin Stannard is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Leicester and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His two-volume biography of Evelyn Waugh (1986, 1992) was warmly received in the UK and America, as was his recent life of Muriel Spark (2009). Currently he is planning a new biography of Ford Madox Ford and is co-Executive Editor of Oxford University Press’s The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.
Much of Jeremy Treglown’s work has been linked by a biographically-based concern with the relations between social history and literary high culture, especially in the twentieth century, including the practicalities of authorship and the nature of the 'literary establishment'. He has published acclaimed biographies of Roald Dahl (1994), Henry Green (2000) and VS Pritchett (2004). He was editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1981 to 1990.
Alexander Waugh is the acclaimed author of God (2002) and of Fathers and Sons (2004), a portrait of the male relations in his own family, which was made into a 90 minute documentary film by BBC 4. His book, The House of Wittgenstein (2008) traces the triumphs and vicissitudes of a family held together by a fanatical love of music yet torn apart by many conflicts of loyalty and the cataclysmic upheaval of two world wars.
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