Event overview
Novelists Tom Lee and Vanessa Tait on the art of fiction at 5pm, followed by neurosurgeon Henry Marsh (author of Do Not Harm) on his new book at 7pm
Tom Lee's writing has appeared in the Sunday Times, Esquire, Prospect, the Dublin Review and in Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope All Story, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2012 he was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. His debut collection of short stories, Greenfly, was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Prize. He currently teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths College, and lives in South London.
Vanessa Tait grew up in Gloucestershire. She went to the University of Manchester and completed a Master's degree in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. She is the author of two novels: The Looking Glass House (2015) and The Pharmacist's Wife (2018). The Looking Glass House was inspired by family treasures – including glass negatives and original prints of Alice and her sisters taken by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Alice’s cookbook and travel diary and stories of her great-grandmother, the ‘original’ Alice.
Henry Marsh read PPE at Oxford and Medicine in London and then trained as a neurosurgeon. His work has been the subject of two major BBC documentaries – Your Life in their Hands in 2003 and The English Surgeon in 2009 which won an Emmy and was described in the New York Times as "Enthralling, astonishing...agonizingly human". His book Do No Harm, published in 2014, became an international best seller and has been translated into 30 languages. “Neurosurgery has found its Boswell” (Ian McEwen). “When a book starts like this - ‘I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing’ - you have to go on reading…” (Karl Ove Knausgaard). The book won both the Sky Arts South Bank Show 2015 Award for Literature and the PEN Ackerley Prize. In 2017 he published a second book Admissions, which became a Number 1 Sunday Times best seller and received reviews as enthusiastic as for his first book. Although retired from full-time work in the NHS he continues to work in diverse countries such as Ukraine, Nepal, and Albania. He is a passionate defender of the NHS. In October 2017 he was awarded the Times’ William Howard Russell Award for non-fiction. He was made a CBE by HM the Queen in 2010.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Dec 2017 | 5:00pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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