Doors will open at 7 pm for a sharp 7.15 pm start.
Kathryn Scanlan, the American writer, will read from 'Aug 9-Fog', in a reading supported by the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio Fund and hosted by Bhanu Kapil.
Scanlan's reading will be preceded by short readings from two PhD students based in the Faculty of English, Idil Tekin and Jigisha Bhattacharya.
Bios:
Kathryn Scanlan is an American writer. She has published two novels and a collection of short stories. Her fiction often reworks non-fictional source material, including interviews and found texts. She has won the Gordon Burn Prize and the Windham-Campbell Prize.
Scanlan won the Gordon Burns Prize (2024) for a cross-genre novel, 'Kick the Latch', which was based on transcribed interviews with a horse trainer. These were carried out in person and then, during the COVID-19 pandemic, over the phone. The interview material is extensively reworked to form a linear narrative of the trainer's life, from birth to retirement, rendered in short chapters arranged in numbered sections. As Scanlan has expressed: “I wanted to preserve – amplify, exaggerate – Sonia's idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. I arrived at what you could call a composite portrait of a self.” 'Aug 9-Fog', just published in the UK by Book Works, is based on a diary found at an estate auction. Written by Cora E. Lacy, an eighty-six-year-old woman living in a small Illinois town, the entries range from 1968 to 1972. Scanlan's project, derived from a compulsive reading and re-reading of this stranger's diary, has been to edit, arrange and rearrange found words into a new composition. Scanlan's collection of short stories, 'The Dominant Animal', published in 2020, focuses on the relationship between humans and the natural world, especially animals. The collection reworks found texts and conversations, including an old book about Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and a conversation with a bus driver.
Jigisha Bhattacharya is a PhD student based in the Faculty of English at Cambridge, who researches empires, prisons, and literature. As a failed poet, she writes fiction and creative non-fiction, and is excited by formal experiments. When not worrying about the world, she tries to understand difficult solidarities, people's resistance, and radical possibilities of hope.
Idil Tekin is a writer, pianist, painter, dancer, knitter, jigsaw puzzler, rapper, and a PhD student in English. The daughter of Turkish and Kurdish parents raised outside of the motherland, she grew up with family and other stories of political resistance. Central to her research is Marxist thought, though she also seeks to engage with Indigenous epistemologies and perspectives. Her current PhD project is on Thomas More's Utopia and the politics of the representation of redistribution. She has been writing and has had her non-fictional texts published since the age of 16. In her poetry, she writes about love, loss, intimacy, solidarity, resistance, ancestry, and identity. When she grows up, she wishes to live in a house big enough to host all loved ones, with a big library and some chickens in the backyard.
Please contact Bhanu Kapil at bk426@cam.ac.uk if you have any questions. The venue has step-free access, and is open to all. The event will last approximately an hour.
