The event will take place in person, on the 22nd of February at 6.30pm, in FAB0.19.

Tom Crewe was born in Middlesbrough in 1989. He has a PhD in nineteenth century British history from the University of Cambridge. Since 2015, he has been an editor at the London Review of Books, to which he contributes essays on politics, art, history and fiction. In 2023 he was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.

The New Life, his first novel, is out now from Chatto & Windus and Scribner. It is the winner of both the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the 2023 Southbank Sky Arts Award for Literature. The novel has been or is being translated into French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Italian.

About The New Life 

After a lifetime spent navigating his desires, John Addington, married to Catherine, has met Frank, a working-class printer.
Meanwhile Henry Ellis's wife Edith has fallen in love with Angelica - and Angelica wants Edith all to herself.

When in 1894 John and Henry decide to write a revolutionary book together, intended to challenge convention and the law, they are both caught in relationships stalked by guilt and shame. Yet they share a vision of a better world, one that will expand possibilities for men and women everywhere.

Their daring book threatens to throw John and Henry, and all those around them, into danger. How far should they go to win personal freedoms? And how high a price are they willing to pay for a new way of living?

‘Filled with nuance and tenderness... charting the lives of men and women who inspired not only political progress but an entire new way of living and loving’ Colm Tóibín

Sponsored by the Writing Programme and the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies Department

Imogen Hermes Gowar is an author with a particular interest in history. Her first novel, the Sunday Times bestseller The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, was a finalist for the MsLexia First Novel Award and the Deborah Rogers Prize; shortlisted for the Women's Prize For Fiction and the Sunday Times PFD Young Writer of the Year Award; and longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize. It won a Betty Trask Award. Her short fiction has been included in the Virago collection HAG: Forgotten Folk Tales Retold, and the bestselling The Haunting Season. She is also the author of Eleanor, an augmented reality walking tour of medieval Norwich.

Annie Garthwaite turned to fiction after a 30-year international business career, fulfilling her lifelong ambition to write an account of Cecily Neville, matriarch of the House of York during the Wars of the Roses and mother of Edward IV and Richard III. Her obsession with Cecily and her family began in school and never left her. Setting off in the world of work, she promised herself that, at age 55, she would give up the day job and write. She did just that, completing her novel while studying for a creative writing MA at the University of Warwick. CECILY is her debut novel and, even before its publication, was named a 'top pick' by The Times and Sunday Times.

David Herd is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. His 2012 collection, All Just, was described by the Los Angeles Review ofBooks as ‘one of the few truly necessary works of poetry written on either side of the Atlantic in the past decade’.

Through, published in 2016, was a Book of the Year in The Heraldnewspaper.

He has given readings and lectures in Europe, North America, India and Australia and has held visiting fellowships at George Mason University, Simon Fraser University and the Writing Center Gloucester, MA. He is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent and a co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales.

Written between 2015 and 2020, David Herd’s new collection, Walk Song, weaves in and out of the Refugee Tales project. Addressing the environments contemporary politics has made, including the border and its hostilities, the poems set out the need for a language of welcome. Through its exploration of landscape and politics, friendship and movement, the book builds, across a series of poetic sequences, towards action and hope.

Eley Williams' collection of fiction Attrib. and Other Stories (2017) was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her novel The Liar's Dictionary won a 2021 Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and listed as a Guardian Book of the Year. Her writing is published in journals and anthologies including Modern Queer Poets, The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story edited by Philip Hensher, and Liberating the Canon edited by Isabel Waidner, with stories and serialised fiction also commissioned by Radio 4. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

link here: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3aJCLEwZrRntYbDixUS4rRzOxK5-_LUD0NVn5RoIEls3Q1%40thread.tacv2/1669733277733?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2209bacfbd-47ef-4465-9265-3546f2eaf6bc%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%225ab84316-b0b9-4165-aa9a-d83c4d9b93e1%22%7d

Former Warwick Writing Programme student presents her debut novel!