Anni Domingo, Tessa Hadley and Romola Garai in conversation with Professor Lara Feigel

250 years after her birth, Austen continues to be beloved, ubiquitous but also oddly enigmatic. Here we bring together acclaimed novelist Tessa Hadley with actor-writers Anni Domingo (part of an innovative postcolonial reinterpretation of Mansfield Park by Watermill Theatre) and Romola Garai (star of the 2009 BBC Emma) to ask why Austen is so perpetually popular and what she has to say to us now. Is she primarily a storyteller, a satirist or a psychologist; someone who celebrates her world and its values or critiques them; and how do we mix celebrating her with critical perspectives? What are the dangers of a ‘heritage’ approach to Austen and how do we get beyond it, or explode it? Why do her novels work so well when transposed into other mediums despite seeming such consummate achievements of novelistic art? Who writing today is perpetuating - or furthering or transforming - her legacy or her agendas?

Can Austen help us figure out what the value of studying English is in the current world? The conversation is designed to help us answer this question, and half the seats at the event are reserved for sixth-formers studying A level English and considering coming to King’s College London.

About the speakers

Anni Domingo is an Actress, Director and Writer and works extensively in Radio, TV, Films and Theatre. She lectures in Drama, and Shakespeare at various Drama Colleges. She has worked in America, Europe, Africa and in many theatres around UK including The National Theatre in Inua Ellam’s highly successful Three Sisters, toured in Robert Icke’s The Doctor to Australia in 2020. Recdently she was in the innovative Watermill Theatre production of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and later at Belgrade Theatre in Coventry in the award winning Swim Aunty Swim.

Her poems and short stories are published in various anthologies, Anni’s first screenplay, ‘Blessed Assurance’ has just been filmed and will be out next year. HerMy debut novel, Breaking the Maafa Chain, was published September 2022, by Jacaranda Books, UK, Pegasus Books, USA in 2022 and in Brazil 2024. An extract from the novel is featured in the New Daughters of Africa (2019) anthology edited by Margaret Busby.

Anni is now working on the sequel ‘Ominira - Queen Victoria’s Black Goddaughters’, as part of her PhD.

Tessa Hadley Portrait

Tessa Hadley has published eight novels - includingThe Past, Late in the Day, and Free Love - and four collections of short stories. Her novella, The Party, was published in 2024. She has short stories regularly in the New Yorker, and reviews for the Guardian and the London Review of Books; she was awarded a Windham Campbell prize for Fiction and the Hawthornden Prize in 2016, and has won the Edge Hill Prize twice: in 2018, for Bad Dreams, and in 2024, for After The Funeral.

Ramola Garai Portrait

Romola Garai is an acclaimed, award-winning actress and film director. She won an Olivier Award in 2025 for her performance as Annie 3 inThe Years at the Harold Pinter, and her performance in Giant was Olivier nominated the same year. She was nominated Best Actress at the Evening Standard British Film Awards for her role as Briony in Atonement. Romola won the British Supporting Actress of the Year award for her role as Siobhan in Inside I’m Dancing and was later nominated for Best Actress at the BAFTA TV awards for her portrayal of Sugar in The Crimson Petal and gained two Golden Globe nominations for her roles in Emma and The Hour.

This event is part of series celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth.

Austen and Us: Why read Jane Austen in 2026?

How We Argue: About Freedom of Speech