HYBRID - "Between Two Futures": Jessie Greengrass on Literature in the Anthropocene

Is anxiety the only possible response to the unfolding climate emergency? Can literature point towards other experiences and emotions: furious defiance, utopian longing, an intimate desire to care about small, close things? In this event, award-winning novelist Jessie Greengrass will read from her latest novel, The High House (2021), and will speak about climate activism and the arts, in conversation with Lara Choksey and Florian Mussgnug. This event is part of "Writers of the Anthropocene" and jointly hosted by the UCL Quo Vadis Festival of the Arts and Humanities, UCL Anthropocene, and the UCL Institute of Advances Studies, and in support of the UCL Sustainable Development Goals Initiative.

Speakers

• Jessie Greengrass spent her childhood in London and Devon. She studied philosophy in Cambridge and now lives in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, with her partner and children. Her collection of short stories, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It (2015) won the Edge Hill Prize and Somerset Maugham Award. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Sight (2018) was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel, The High House (2021) was shortlisted for the 2021 the Costa Novel Award and the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Encore Award and is currently shortlisted for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

• Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures in the UCL English Department and the author of Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

• Florian Mussgnug is Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies in the UCL School of European Languages, Culture and Society and a member of the UCL Anthropocene steering group.

This is a HYBRID event. 

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