Sat 23 Sept, 6-7 pm, St Peter's Church, De Beauvoir Sq.
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M. John Harrison and Isabel Waidner in conversation, chaired by Samuel Fisher
Don’t say weird and what can you say but the Weird? Realist fantasy? Brutalist science fiction? We’re honoured to welcome two Goldsmiths Prize-winning writers who shape and are shaped by a literary slipstream space few others can see, and who take us there in prose that illuminates the darkness like stolen fireworks. Committed to the unpredictable as artists, they use it to lay out the all-too-predictable specifics of power as it bends reality to its will – and, with wit and wits, they bend it back. Part-human green beings may or may not appear in M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Begins to Rise Again and the writer himself may or may not cohere in his anti-memoir Wish I Was Here – while in Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Isabel Waidner’s prize-winning writer Corey (def not hemidemisemiautobio) finds themselves on a wild deer hunt after a missing literary prize and an eight-legged Bambi Pavok from another dimension. Who knows what will happen at this panel – you have to be there.
Bios:
M John "Mike" Harrison has written a dozen novels & half a dozen collections of short stories under his own name. His most recent novel, The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, was awarded the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction. He was born in the Midlands & now lives in Shropshire.
Isabel Waidner is a writer based in London. They are the author of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Sterling Karat Gold, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff and Gaudy Bauble. They are the winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2021 and were shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2019, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2022 and the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2018, 2020 and 2022. They are a co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and they are an academic in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London.
Samuel Fisher is a writer, bookseller and publisher. He is the author of The Chameleon and Wivenhoe. His third novel, Migraine is forthcoming in 2024. He is a co founder of Burley Fisher Books and Peninsula Press.
Isabel Waidner headshot © Robin Christian