Laura Bear is a specialist on India and ethnographies of the state, labour, and memory. She has conducted fieldwork in a railway company town, Kharagpur, in India particularly among Anglo-Indian workers and their families. Further theoretical interests in globalisation and technology, her current research is on international call centre workers in Calcutta.

David Lan was appointed artistic director of the Young Vic in 2000 where he has established the Genesis Directors Project, the Jerwood Directors Award and the Young Vic Award. He won an Olivier Award for the 2004 Young Vic season. He led the £12.5 million rebuild of the Young Vic theatre and the two year Walkabout season while the theatre was closed. His productions at the Young Vic include Julius Caesar (2000), A Raisin in the Sun (2001, revival and tour 2005), Doctor Faustus (2002), The Daughter-in-Law (2002) and The Skin of Our Teeth (2004). He directed As You Like It at Wyndhams (2005) as part of Walkabout.

Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he lives near Verona with his wife and three children. He has written eleven novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Destiny and Judge Savage (longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000 and 2003), as well as, most recently, Dreams of Rivers and Seas. In addition to this he has written three non-fictional accounts of life in northern Italy, a collection of 'narrative' essays, and a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence. His many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Tabucchi, Calvino and Calasso. He lectures on literary translation in Milan and has published a book, Translating Style, which analyses Italian translations of the English modernists, plus two collections of essays Hell and Back and The Fighter that range from Dante to Leopardi, Borges to Rushdie, Machiavelli to Garibaldi.

This is part of the LSE Space for Thought Literary Weekend, the LSE's first ever Literary Festival, celebrating the completion of the New Academic Building.

Podcast

A podcast of this event is available to download from the LSE public lectures and events podcasts channel.

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