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
The BookTalk team, in partnership with Cardiff Amnesty International, are delighted to announce our first event of the new academic year! The award-winning former BBC journalist Emma-Jane Kirby will be speaking at a joint Cardiff Amnesty International Human Rights Book Club / Cardiff University BookTalk … 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…
‘…Woolf saw that a subjective perspective was required to make sense of how death continues to inflect the mood of a generation. Mourning, as Sigmund Freud also realised at a similar point, is ongoing, illusory work. What is remarkable about her writing is that Woolf … Continue reading ‘We cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters’
In this clip, Krishnan Guru-Murthy interviews Hilary Mantel in the wake of her 2012 Booker Prize win for Bringing Up the Bodies. She discusses whether her handling of Thomas Cromwell is too sympathetic and considers the differences between the first two volumes of the trilogy. … Continue reading Hilary Mantel – interview with Channel 4 News
Prior to this week’s BookTalk, Hilary Mantel introduces The Mirror and The Light, the latest and final volume in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Here she discusses writing historical fiction and reads an extract from the opening of the novel. Book your place here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cardiff-booktalk-hilary-mantel-registration-125345332263
12 May, 7:30pm (please note later start time) Book tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cardiff-booktalk-hilary-mantel-registration-125345332263 ‘This book has been the greatest challenge of my writing life, and the most rewarding; I hope and trust my readers will find it has been worth the wait.’ – Hilary Mantel The … Continue reading Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light
