The ‘modern novel’ discussed again – 88 years on
Join DJ Taylor and others for Lit & Phil chat
If you like getting your head in a book, a panel discussion at the Lit & Phil called The Modern Novel should make your eyes light up.
It’s scheduled for September 9 and promises a lively hour with panellists DJ Taylor, Rachel Hore, Margaret Wilkinson and George Cochrane batting ideas back and forth.
But will that be long enough? Even defining ‘modern’ in this context might take up chunks of the allotted 60 minutes.
How modern is ‘modern’? Everything was modern once.
The title – in common with other events in this Lit & Phil bicentenary year - is taken from a lecture given at the Lit & Phil in 1937 by novelist Phyllis Bentley when she was something of a literary celebrity.
Her most famous novel, Inheritance, had been published five years previously, a family saga set against the textile industry of West Yorkshire - a world she knew well since she was a mill owner’s daughter from Halifax, born in 1894.
Inheritance, chronicling the fortunes of the Oldroyd family, was her seventh and breakout novel and all followed her first published work, a 1918 book of short stories called The World’s Bane.
She died in 1977, with 14 novels to her name along with works of non-fiction (including works on the Brontë sisters), scripts and 24 detective short stories for magazines.
DJ Taylor, well known for his novels and biographies, has been a star attraction at the Lit & Phil several times. His Poppyland, a collection of short stories set in his native Norfolk, was published in June.
In 2023, in Orwell: The New Life, he returned to the subject of his prize-winning biography of 20 years previously, and last year saw the publication of his Who Is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell.
On September 8, the day before the panel discussion, DJ Taylor will be ‘in conversation’ with Rachel Hore on the subject of his 25 Years with George Orwell.
Rachel’s latest novel, The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge, came out in July. Before embarking on a career as a prolific writer of fiction, she worked in publishing which is where she first met DJ Taylor.
She has been with him rather longer than he has been with the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and the rest. The couple were married in 1990.
Margaret Wilkinson, a New Yorker who has lived for the best part of 30 years in Newcastle, is a writer and teacher of creative writing - for the most part, until her retirement, on the MA course at Newcastle University
Her novel Lublin, published under the name Manya Wilkinson, won this year’s Wingate Prize, given annually since 1977 to the best book with a Jewish theme.
The judges called it “marvellously impossible to categorise” and added: “At once personal and epic, on the surface it is a tale of three young friends setting off on an adventure.
“In a scant 200 pages it creates a portrait of the joys and costs of friendship, while also providing an effortless discourse on the history of Europe and European Jewry — one that also looks compellingly towards the future.”
George Cochrane, a writer and editor based in Newcastle, has had work published in various newspapers and magazines and is working on his first novel.
But tickets for The Modern Novel discussion via the Lit & Phil website.