LSE Space for Thought Literary Weekend Launch Event & Reception
Date: Friday 27 February 2009
Time: 8-9.15pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speakers: Mohsin Hamid, David Hare, Boyd Tonkin
Chair: Howard Davies
This event marks the launch of the LSE Space for Thought Literary Weekend, the LSE's first ever Literary Festival, celebrating the completion of the New Academic Building. A discussion about not only the links between the social sciences and the arts, but the role of the arts in the LSE's past, present and future. Is literature relevant today?
The event will be followed by a reception, open to all attendees, as a celebration of the launch of the Literary Weekend.
Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School and worked for several years as a management consultant in New York. His first novel, Moth Smoke published in ten languages, won a Betty Trask award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His latest novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which deals with the aftermath of 9/11, was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
David Hare's best-known stage plays include Plenty, Racing Demon, The Absence of War, Skylight, Amy's View, Via Dolorosa, Stuff Happens and Gethsemane. He has written the screenplays for a number of films including Damage, The Hours and The Reader.
Boyd Tonkin studied English and French literature at Cambridge University. He taught literature in higher and adult education before becoming an award-winning magazine journalist, as feature writer and features editor of the weekly magazine for social-services professionals, Community Care. Already a freelance writer and interviewer for The Observer, he became social policy editor of the New Statesman, and then Literary Editor, before moving to The Independent as Literary Editor. In addition to working as organiser and judge on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize since 2000, he has judged the Booker Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and (in 2007) the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature. He has reported on literary and artistic issues from more than 20 countries on four continents, and his cultural essays have been published widely; most recently, in the British Council anthology New Writing 15 (Granta).
Podcast & Video
A podcast and video of this event is available to download from LSE Literary Weekend - The Founders' Tradition: literature as social commentary