Speakers: Tison Pugh, Sabina Rahman, and Usha Vishnuvajjala. At our 8 December 2021 event we will be considering the recent film The Green Knight (dir. David Lowery and starring Dev Patel and Alicia Vikander) alongside its source text, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late 14th-century Middle English … Continue reading Cardiff BookTalk: The Green Knight
On Wednesday 17 November 2021, Cardiff BookTalk will be discussing Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Published in 1940, the novel tells the tale of a Catholic ‘whisky priest’ living in the Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s. During this time, the Mexican … Continue reading Graham Greene – The Power and the Glory
The BookTalk team are delighted to announce some of the titles we will be discussing in the next academic year. Events will remain online until at least February 2022. 21 October 2021, 7pm: The Optician of Lampedusa by Emma Jane KirbyEvent in partnership with Cardiff … Continue reading Coming soon for 2021-22
‘Now Kirby tells their tale at greater length in The Optician of Lampedusa. Though a small book, just 120 pages between its hard sea-blue covers, this is no extended exercise in reportage. Instead, Kirby tells it as a moral tale, following events through the eyes … Continue reading ‘They hear a noise that initially they take for seagulls screaming…’
‘Carmine Menna runs the only optician’s shop on the little island of Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily. Although he saw the migrants all around him every day and felt pity for them, he did not really see them – he did not want to … Continue reading ‘An optician’s job, after all, is to make people see clearly…’
The BookTalk team, in partnership with Cardiff Amnesty International, are delighted to announce our first event of the new academic year! On 21 October, the award-winning former BBC journalist Emma-Jane Kirby will be speaking at a joint Cardiff Amnesty International Human Rights Book Club / … Continue reading Emma Jane Kirby – The Optician of Lampedusa
We’re currently hard at work putting together the programme for next semester. If there’s anything you’d like us to cover please get in touch and let us know, or just leave a comment below. In the meantime, you can watch and rewatch and generally binge … Continue reading Cardiff BookTalk on YouTube
The complexities of marriage and familial relationships are explored in Virginia Woolf’s brilliant stream of consciousness novel. While vacationing on the Isle of Skye, the youngest of the Ramsay children, James, eagerly anticipates a visit to a lighthouse, however, Mr. Ramsay believes the weather will … Continue reading Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse
‘… So for example, the Yeats poem “The Second Coming” [that’s the one that starts: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer”]. That’s a canonical poem. He wrote it in 1919, and it has been read, quite rightly, as … Continue reading ‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed’
It was the summer of 1910. Wispy cirrus clouds skittered nervously across a pale sky as Lily Briscoe, brush in hand, stood before her easel at the edge of the lawn in front of the Ramsay’s house. From where she was standing she had a clear view of the sea and the rocky coastline of the Isle of Skye, and then, at some distance from the shore and standing out starkly in the soft summer light, the lighthouse, a tall, solitary pharos on a rock barely the size of a tennis court. But her canvas was empty…
