at kings place, london
The Guardian Hay Festival comes to London with a special festival programme of conversations, lectures
and performances by writers and
artists exploring the literature
of London. The events profile contemporary writers and publications in a relaxed variety format, with wine, booksignings managed by Foyles, and great conversation.
Tickets will be on sale at www.kingsplace.co.uk on 5 October and at the Kings Place Box Office. Kings Place is a new arts centre, located just a few minutes walk from Kings Cross station, bringing together under one roof a creative hub, a dining venue and a conference and events centre.
Tickets from £4.50
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The programme
Friday 23 October
6pm – Hall One (425)
Charlie Higson
Meet the author of the phenomenally successful Young Bond, as he shares his love for all things horror in his new heart-stopping zombie-thriller The Enemy. Survival on London’s streets has never been so chilling. The build-up to Halloween starts here.
6.30pm – St Pancras Room (100)
Scritture Giovani – 4am: Paul Brodowsky (Ger), Gabriele Dadati (Ita), Céline Robinet (Fr), chaired by Anita Sethi
The unique project commissions stories on the same theme from leading European writers in their twenties, selected by the three leading literary festivals in Berlin, Mantova and Hay. This year’s theme is set as ‘4am’. The writers read their work and discuss their approaches to the subject.
Saturday 24 October
11am – St Pancras Room (100)
Fashion with Compassion
Calling all fashion lovers! From high street to haute couture, find out how the fashion world really works from Sophia Bennett, author of Threads, a truly original fashion fairytale for teens that will lift your heart and open your eyes.
1pm – Hall One (425)
Fay Weldon talks to Peter Guttridge
The novelist discusses Chalcot Crescent – a wickedly sharp, history-bending, cosmos-colliding new novel that tells the story of Frances, Fay’s never-born younger sister.
2.30pm – Hall One (425)
Andrew Davies – This event has been cancelled
The screenwriter explores the portrayal of London in his Emmy award-winning adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit. He talks to Peter Florence.
4pm – Hall One (425)
Posy Simmonds
The great graphic artist demonstrates and discusses her work and her much-loved masterpiece Tamara Drewe. Tamara Drewe has transformed herself. Plastic surgery, a different wardrobe, a smouldering look, have given her confidence and a new and thrilling power to attract, which she uses recklessly. Often just for the fun of it. People are drawn to Tamara Drewe, male and female. In the remote village where her late mother lived Tamara arrives to clear up the house. Here she becomes an object of lust, of envy, the focus of unrequited love, a seductress.
5.30pm – Hall One (425)
Hanif Kureishi
The iconic writer discusses his novel and screen versions of one of the great London stories The Buddha of Suburbia. He talks to Peter Florence.
7pm – Hall One (425)
John Sutherland, Claire Armitstead, Peter Florence
The UCL super-Don examines the writing of London in Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Martin Amis, Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith with the Guardian’s Literary Editor and the Hay Festival director.
Sunday 25 October
11.30am – Hall One (425)
Mary Kay Wilmers talks to Anita Sethi
The LRB Editor discusses her remarkable family exploration The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story. Leonid Eitingon was a KGB killer who dedicated his life to the Soviet regime. He was in China in the early 1920s, in Turkey in the late 1920s, in Spain during the Civil War, and, crucially, in Mexico when Trotsky was assassinated. ‘As long as I live’, Stalin had said, ‘not a hair of his head shall be touched’. It did not work out like that. Max Eitingon was a psychoanalyst, a colleague, friend and protegé of Freud’s. He was rich, secretive and – through his friendship with a famous Russian singer – implicated in the abduction of a white Russian general in Paris in 1937. Motty Eitingon was a New York fur dealer whose connections with the Soviet Union made him the largest trader in the world. Imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, questioned by the FBI, was Motty everybody’s friend or everybody’s enemy?
1pm – Hall One (425)
Steve Jones
The geneticist introduces his outstanding Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England. The Origin of Species is the most famous book in science but its stature tends to obscure the genius of Charles Darwin’s other works. The Beagle voyage, too, occupied only five of the fifty years of his career. He spent only five weeks on the Galapagos and on his return never left Britain again. Darwin wrote six million words, in nineteen books and innumerable letters, on topics as different as dogs, barnacles, insect-eating plants, orchids, earthworms, apes and human emotion. Together, they laid the foundations of modern biology.
2pm – St Pancras Room (100)
Meg Rosoff
Step back in time with this enchanting author as she discusses The Bride’s Farewell – an ethereal tale of love, loss and discovery. A real treat. She talks to Sophie Lording.
2.30pm – Hall One (425)
Will Self talks to Claire Armitstead
The novelist and journalist whose recent work includes the Wodehouse Prize-winning The Butt, Liver and Other Stories and his new collaboration with Ralph Styeadman, Psycho Too. He talks to The Guardian’s literary editor.
4pm – Hall One (425)
Dan Cruickshank: The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital
Georgian London evokes images of elegant buildings and fine art, but it was also a city where prostitution was rife, houses of ill repute widespread, and many tens of thousands of people dependent in some way or other on the wages of sin. The sex industry was, in fact, a very powerful force indeed, and in The Secret History of Georgian London Dan Cruickshank compellingly shows how it came to affect almost every aspect of life and culture in the capital.
5.30pm – Hall Two (198)
Martin Amis talks to Peter Florence
The novelist discusses the London of his fiction in The Information, London Fields and Money. His new novel The Pregnant Widow will be published next spring.
