Tuesday 10th Oct
6:30-9pm
Join us to celebrate the launch of Lottie Whalen’s book, Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern (Reaktion), at Burley Fisher, 6.30-9pm, Tuesday 10 October.
Lottie will be in conversation with the award-winning novelist of The Flames, Sophie Haydock, moderated by writer Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou. Raise a glass, listen to readings and join our conversation about women artists, the cultural scenes of New York and Vienna in the early twentieth century, and the way women helped to shape both.
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About the Radicals and Rogues, and The Flames
Radicals and Rogues chronicles the women who trailblazed New York’s artistic scene in the early 1900s.
This is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth century’s capital of modern culture. Across the 1910s and ’20s, through provocative creative acts, shocking fashion, political activism and dynamic social networks, these women reimagined modern life and fought for the chance to realize their visions. Taking the reader on a journey through the city’s salons and bohemian hangouts, Radicals and Rogues celebrates the tastemakers, collectors, curators, artists and poets at the forefront of the early avant-garde scene. Focusing on the women trailblazers at the centre of artistic innovation, Lottie Whalen offers a lively new history of remarkable women in early twentieth-century New York City.
The Flames (Penguin) is a gripping historical novel set in 1900s Vienna featuring four fiery women.
A new century is dawning. Vienna is at its zenith, an opulent, extravagant city teeming with art, music and radical ideas. It is a place where anything seems possible...
Edith and Adele are sisters, the daughters of a wealthy bourgeois family. They are expected to follow the rules, to marry well, and produce children. Gertrude is in thrall to her flamboyant older brother. Marked by a traumatic childhood, she envies the freedom he so readily commands. Vally was born into poverty but is making her way in the world as a model for the eminent artist Gustav Klimt.
Fierce, passionate and determined, none of these women is quite what they seem. But their lives are set on a collision course when they become entangled with the controversial young artist Egon Schiele whose work - and private life - are sending shockwaves through Viennese society. All it will take is a single act of betrayal to set their world on fire...
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About the Authors
Lottie Whalen is a writer and researcher based in Glasgow, UK. Radicals and Rogues: the Women Who Made New York Modern is her first book, published by Reaktion in September 2023. She completed a PhD on modernist artist, designer, and poet Mina Loy, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is the co-founder of Decorating Dissidence, an interdisciplinary arts project that explores radical histories of craft and making from modernism to the contemporary. She also works on community-led heritage projects in the third sector. Lottie is currently working on her next book Women Make Cities: Creative Experiments in Urban Life. Follow Lottie on Instagram @lottie___whale and on Twitter @LotWhalen
Sophie Haydock is an award-winning author living in east London. Her debut novel, The Flames, is about the four muses who posed for the artist Egon Schiele in Vienna more than 100 years ago. She is the winner of the Impress Prize for New Writers and was longlisted for the Historical Writers' Association's Debut Novel Award. Sophie trained as a journalist at City University, London, and has worked at the Sunday Times Magazine, Tatler and BBC Three, as well as freelancing for publications including the Financial Times, Guardian Weekend magazine, Arts Council, Royal Academy and Sotheby’s. She has interviewed leading authors, including Hilary Mantel, Maggie O’Farrell, Bernardine Evaristo, Sally Rooney and Amy Tan. Passionate about short stories, Sophie also works as a digital editor for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and is associate director of the Word Factory literary organisation. She judges writing competitions and hosts her own short story club. Her Instagram account @egonschieleswomen – dedicated to the women who posed for Egon Schiele – has a community of over 110,000 followers. Follow Sophie on Instagram @_sophiehaydock_ and Twitter @SophieHaydock
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou is a writer, the founding editor-in-chief and general arts editor of Lucy Writers, and is currently writing up her PhD in English Literature (and Visual Material Culture) at UCL. She regularly writes on visual art, dance and literature for magazines such as The London Magazine, The White Review, The Arts Desk, Plinth UK, Burlington Contemporary, review 31, The Double Negative and many others. From 2022-2023, Hannah will be managing an Arts Council England-funded project for emerging women and non-binary writers from migrant backgrounds, titled What the Water Gave Us, in collaboration with The Ruppin Agency and Writers’ Studio, which has already resulted in an anthology of the same name. She is also working on a hybrid work of creative non-fiction about women artists and drawing, an extract from which is published in Prototype’s 2023 anthology, Prototype 5. Read her work https://linktr.ee/hhgsparkles Follow her on Twitter @hhgsparkles and Instagram @hannahhg25