What’s the Use of Literature?

RSL and King’s College London presents

What’s the Use of Literature?

with Aminatta Forna, Priyamvada Gopal, Clare Lees, Andrew Motion,

Ross Raisin, Polly Toynbee, Michael Wood

Monday 20 June; Edmond J. Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s College London, Strand Campus; 6.30pm.

As the numbers applying to read English Literature at university rise, financial support for the arts falls, and higher education faces fundamental changes to its funding, King’s College London and the Royal Society of Literature ask: What’s The Use Of Literature?

Programme details

Polly Toynbee chairs a panel of three – Priyamvada Gopal, Clare Lees and Michael Wood – to address the following questions:

-         Does a degree in English Literature equip you for life?

-         How can public funding for the study of arts subjects be justified when there is a shortage of funding for the study of the sciences?

-         Do those wanting to study English Literature beyond A level really need to go to university to do so?

-         

The discussion is interspersed with personal reflections from Andrew Motion and Ross Raisin on what studying English Literature at university meant to them, and from Aminatta Forna on how literature helps her understand the world. The event will be held in the Edmond J. Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s College London, Strand Campus, from 6.30 to 8.30pm. From 5.30pm, there will be a drinks reception in Chapters, King’s College London (first floor), to which the audience is warmly invited.

Booking details

To reserve seats, please call Hazel Tsoi-Wiles on 020 7845 4676, or email hazel@rslit.org. Fellows and Members of the RSL can book online via the website – www.rslit.org. There will be a limited number of tickets available for members of the public on the door.

Speakers biographies

POLLY TOYNBEE, broadcaster and Guardian columnist, dropped out of Oxford University after 18 months, and went to work in a factory. She wrote about her experiences in A Working Life. Her subsequent books include Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain, and Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today.

PRIYAMVADA GOPAL is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and has written on literature from Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie. In recent months, she has written forcefully in the media about her opposition to the rise in university tuition fees, and her fears for the future of the arts and humanities in this country.

CLARE LEES is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Director of the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies at King’s College London, where she teaches Old and Middle English Literature. She is currently editing The Cambridge History of Earlier Medieval Literature.

MICHAEL WOOD is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, and former Professor of English at the University of Exeter. He has written books on Nabokov, Kafka and Gabriel García Márquez, and on oracles, contemporary fiction and film. He writes regularly for the LRB and New York Review of Books.

AMINATTA FORNA grew up in Scotland and Sierra Leone, and, after studying Law at University College London, worked for the BBC. The Devil that Danced on the Water, a memoir of her dissident father, was

runner-up for the Samuel Johnson Prize, 2003. Her second novel, The Memory of Love, was shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize.

ANDREW MOTION, former Poet Laureate, read English at Oxford. As well as writing poetry, novels and biographies, he has worked as editorial director at Chatto & Windus, editor of Poetry Review, and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is now Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway.

ROSS RAISIN went on from Bradford Grammar to study English at King’s College London. His debut novel, God’s Own Country, made him Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2009. His second novel,

Waterline, is published this month. He has worked as