Linda Grant & Charlotte Mendelson in conversation with Alex Clark

Sunday October 13th. 5.00pm at the Big Green Bookshop.

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The Festival is delighted to have two of the finest contemporary novelists, Linda Grant and Charlotte Mendelson here in conversation with journalist Alex Clark

Linda Grant. Linda was born in Liverpool, the child of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. She was educated at the Belvedere School (GDST), read English at the University of York, completed an M.A. in English at MacMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario and did further post-graduate studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, where she lived from 1977 to 1984

Her first book, Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution was published in 1993. Her first novel, The Cast Iron Shore, soon followed and won the David Higham First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize.

Remind Me Who I am Again, an account of her mother’s decline into dementia and the role that memory plays in creating family history, published in 1998, won the MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year award and the Age Concern Book of the Year award.

Her second novel, When I Lived in Modern Times, set in Tel Aviv in the last years of the British Mandate, won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Prize and the Encore Prize.

Her novel, Still Here, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and was followed by The Clothes On Their Backs, published in February 2008 which reached the Booker Prize shortlist and won the South Bank Show award. Her latest novel We Had It So Good is published by Virago.

July 2012 Linda received an honorary doctorate from the University of York. 

Charlotte Mendelson Charlotte was born in London in 1972 and grew up in Oxford.  She has written and reviewed for the Guardian, the TLS, the Independent on Sunday, the Observer and elsewhere. She lives in London.

Charlotte’s first short story, ‘Blood Sugar’, was published in New Writing 7 and twice broadcast on Radio 4.  Her first novel, Love in Idleness, published in 2001, was largely written in her lunch breaks at work. 

For Daughters of Jerusalem , her second novel, she was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.  Charlotte also received the London Arts New London Writers’ Award and a K. Blundell Trust Award, and was shortlisted for Le Prince Maurice Roman d’Amour Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. 

Her third novel, When We Were Bad, was published in May 2007, and was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008.  She was also chosen as one of Waterstone's 25 authors of the future. 

Her latest novel, Almost English has just been published to huge critical acclaim and has been longlisted for the  2013 Booker Prize.

 

Linda and Charlotte will be in conversation with Alex Clark who described Almost English recently in The Guardian "a little masterpiece of characterisation and milieu."

Alex has been a literary critic for many years, writing for publications such as The Observer, The Sunday Times,The Telegraph and The Times Literary Supplement. She has also had the unenviable position of Booker Prize judge. 

Alex has also been the Editor of Granta Magazine and currently writes for The Guardian. 

Tickets cost £3 and are available HERE