Telling the Tales of our Ancestors

18.00 Thursday 26 November 2009
Old Anatomy Theatre, King's Building, Strand Campus
 
Lisa Appignanesi (PEN President)
Eva Hoffman
Chair: Jonathan Heawood (PEN director)
 
Discussions are free and open to the public but booking is essential. 
Please contact Susie Christensen to book.
 

The Centre for Life-writing will join English PEN in an event that explores the relationship between life-writing and oppression.  Lisa Appignanesi's Losing the Dead and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation are memoirs which in part evoke the world of their ancestors during the Holocaust.
 
Trying to imagine the lives of the persecuted, serves as a step to renegotiating their own relationship with their pasts.  Both now campaign for human rights and freedom from oppression and here they will discuss the role of their family memoirs in their political activism.  PEN director Jonathan Heawood will question the speakers about the extent to which writing the memoirs has made them reconfigure their sense of themselves and shaped their concerns with justice.
 
 
The talk will be followed by a follow-up discussion for King’s students interested in joining English PEN.