Claire Messud And Anne Michaels In Conversation. Chair: Elif Shafak

Join us for a conversation between two of contemporary literature’s best and most beloved writers. Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History and Anne Michaels’ Held are both hotly tipped and keenly anticipated books for 2024. Each lyrically and breathtakingly offers narratives of huge historical scope, traversing borders, landscapes and generations. Each begins in a world war, tracing the fragments created in those moments, which haunt the generations that follow. Chairing the conversation is the award-winning and internationally best-selling Turkish-British novelist Elif Shafak. On This Strange Eventful History: ‘One of those rare novels which a reader doesn’t merely read but lives through with the characters . . . Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller’ – Yiyun Li On Held: ‘I am blown away by the scale, beauty, weave and thinking of this book… It dances with words, time and ideas in a way that seems to reinvent everything I know about the novel’ – Rachel Joyce Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction including The Emperor’s Children, named New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post’s Best Book of the Year, When The World Was Steady (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), The Hunters and The Burning Girl. She is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Anne Michaels IFRSL is a novelist and poet. Her books are translated into more than fifty languages and have won multiple awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Award for Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, and has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film. Her most recent books include All We Saw, Infinite Gradation and Railtracks (co-written with John Berger). In 2020, her novel Fugitive Pieces was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World. Elif Shafak is a novelist, essayist, political scientist and activist. Author of 19 books, her work has been translated into 57 languages. Her latest novel, The Island of Missing Trees, was shortlisted for the Costa Award, British Book Awards, RSL Ondaatje Prize and Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Forty Rules of Love was chosen by the BBC for its 100 Novels that Shaped Our World. Shafak is a Fellow and a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature and has been chosen among BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women.