UNESCO City of Literature: Lectures and Roundtable

About

Thursday 2nd & Friday 3rd May | 2024
Nottingham Central Library
FREE

Join Nottingham Central Library for two days of insightful lectures and discussions around stories passed down, how we inherit them, and the forces that go into revealing the core of a character.

Lecture Series

Tahmima Anam, "Standing on my Grandfather's Back: Migration, Identity, and How we Inherit our Stories"
Thursday 2nd May, 6.30pm to 8.30pm | Room 6 & 7

Tahmima Anam's grandfather, Abul Mansur Ahmed, was born in a village in colonial India, and went on to become a political satirist and short story writer. In this lecture, she will explore themes of identity and storytelling through the lens of inheritance, both familial and national.

Chris McCormick, "Counterpoints: Desire and Nostalgia in the Art of the Short Story."
Friday 3rd May, 3.30pm to 5.30pm. Lecture starts at 4pm | Room 6 & 7

Chris McCormick will be discussing these forces as two colliding ends of a central pressurizing machine, intent on revealing the innermost soul of a character. Although the lecture will include examples ranging from Anton Chekhov to Kazuo Ishiguro to Leslie Nneka Arimah, he's particularly interested in these forces within the cultural contexts of immigrant and diasporic writers like Bharati Mukherjee and Bernard Malamud. Because Mukherjee was a teacher of Chris, and because Malamud was a teacher of hers, the lecture will also include a thread about mentorship in the art form. Lastly, he'll discuss the application of these theories to his own short stories, where thematic and aesthetic questions have been shaped by his Armenian heritage.

Roundtable

The Art of Short Form Narrative: Creative Writing and Ethnic Identity - Writers' Roundtable Discussion
Friday 3 May, 12.00pm to 1pm | Room 4
Booking link: forms.office.com/e/x3bULQNAta

Please join internationally acclaimed writers Tahmima Anam, Chris McCormick and Jon McGregor in discussion about short fiction, identity, ethnicity and the creative process. This event will be chaired by Ruth Maxey (University of Nottingham). All welcome!