THE finale takes place at Salisbury Guildhall, 6.30pm on Monday, October 22, when a panel of four authors will be in conversation about truth and storytelling. The Sarum Symposium is a Sarum College event in association with the Literary Festival: Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Barney Norris, Lionel Shriver and Erica Wagner.
Each brings a unique perspective on the theme, with questions such as: What do fictional stories have to say about truth? Do stories told in books, films and plays fill an important gap in this ‘post-truth’ era? Have they always?
The starting point for the discussion is the late Ursula Le Guin’s words in a speech to accept an award for her contribution to literature: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”
About the panel:
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan says of her novel Harmless Like You, “A lot of what the book is about is how pain shape-shifts down the generations. There is nothing more personal than family, and yet families are so profoundly affected by political decisions.”
Barney Norris, a Salisbury native who writes books and plays, in Turning for Home, he writes: “Isn’t the life of any person made up out of the telling of two tales, after all? People live in the space between the realities of their lives and the hopes they have for them. The whole world makes more sense if you remember that everyone has two lives, their real lives and their dreams.”
Lionel Shriver is best known for her explosive novel about a teenager who committed a school massacre, We Need to Talk About Kevin, which was made into the 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton. In The Mandibles, a satire of economic collapse, she writes: “Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present. They’re not about the future at all.”
The panel is chaired by Erica Wagner, who teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths and frequently judges literary prizes. A lover of stories who seeks out “fine storytellers from all over the world.”
Tickets for the Sarum Symposium are available from Sarum College: info@sarum.ac.uk or 01722 424826.
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