News-Events

‍ MAY 2025

Bestsellers!

can they be good books?

Presteigne Festival. 10 May 2025. 3-4pm

Assembly Rooms, Presteigne, Wales LD8 2AD

Each with multiple books, glowing reviews and award nominations to their names, authors Michèle Roberts and Patricia Duncker discuss what makes a bestseller. Can it actually be a good book? Who gets to judge? What about bestsellers of the past? Michèle and Patricia jointly ran the famous creative writing course at the University of East Anglia and have talked and thought about books ever since. Join their conversation about reading and writing in a warm, welcoming atmosphere.

Tickets: £7

View Presteigne Festival website

My Three Favourite Reads of 2024

Percival Everett James

Jenny Newman In the Blood

Orlando Whitfield All That Glitters

Why have I chosen these three books and what do they have in common? I asked myself this question and found that the answer was surprisingly revealing. At the core of all three books is a friendship. And I am very interested in writers who can teach me how to write about friendship and dramatise the dynamics of a relationship that is fundamental to so many epic tales. Most books contain a crime, even when they are not crime novels, and if family dramas and romance don’t crowd out friendship, stories of loyalty and betrayal are the strongest themes in the books I love.

Friendship is a connection that often unites odd couples and childhood gangs. Most friendships are unequal. There is always one who longs to be special to the other and may make more demands. There is always one who is courted and one who enjoys the power to give or to withhold. Friendships, like love affairs, can explode and vanish. Or they can simply fade into distance and coolness. Many friendships prove to be entirely imaginary wish fulfilments, not so much a question of an insincere attachment as a complete delusion. Some bonds, however, are life long and last up to and beyond the death of both parties.

What links these three books is the exploration of three very different friendships: the bond between two runaways, the adult Black slave, James, and the child Huck Finn in Percival Everett’s reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The at first fraught and finally loyal friendship between Jackie, the heroine of Newman’s novel, and the legitimate son of the great house, Oliver, is a relationship that transforms the lives of both children. Whitfield charts the unravelling of the friendship between two ambitious young men in All That Glitters, the author himself, and the man who enthralled him for fifteen years, Inigo Philbrick.

It takes two in all three books to generate the action, emotion and tension, essential to all good stories.

Now Read On ….

View the article on the Shepherd website

‍ SUMMER 2024

A New Special issue of the journal Neo-Victorian Studies

edited by Armelle Parey and Charlotte Wadoux (University of Caen, France)

Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Media

Victorian authors feature prominently as characters in contemporary biofictions that re-imagine the lives of actual historical figures of the Long Nineteenth Century. As the genre of biofiction has garnered more attention in the last decade, notably with the creation of a book series dedicated to it – Biofiction Studies– this special issue focuses on the representation of Victorian writers, challenging Roland Barthes’s assertion regarding the death of the author and propounding the author’s return as a character in fiction and other media.

Binding together biography and fiction, biographical fiction or biofiction as a scholarly subject per se is still comparatively new, only gathering momentum in the early 2010s. This lack of recognition was mainly due to the generic cross-over entailed by the form itself which was at first considered a subgenre of the historical novel and is still at times subordinated to another genre altogether, namely that of biographies . The recognition of biofiction as a genre in its own right, evolving from “bastard” to “hybrid”, pinpoints the paradoxes inherent to the form. This state of affairs might indeed result from the irreducible hybridity of the genre, which lends itself to various interpretations, as Cora Kaplan has it: “It implies that there is something stubbornly insoluble in what separates the two genres [biography and fiction] and that prevents them from being invisibly sutured; the join will always show.” Biofiction, maybe more than any other form of fiction, is thus ready to acknowledge this “join”, embracing the idea that fiction is nourished by the extra-textual or the ‘real’. The “join” between bio and fiction is arguably most apparent in biofictions of writers, which very often focus on the writer-at-work.

Patricia has contributed an article:

Fan Fictions: Victorian Celebrity Writers and their Contemporary Defenders - Reimagining Henry James and Lewis Carroll

Read Patricia’s article (Neo-Victorian Studies website)

View the Neo-Victorian Studies website

Three Favourite Reads of 2023

Patricia was invited to compile her best books from the last year for the book recommendation website Shepherd.com

View website

‍ JUNE 2023

Chase of the Wild Goose

Saturday 3rd June 2023, 2-3:30pm, Plas Newydd, Llangollen, Wales

Publisher of Lurid Editions D-M Withers in conversation with novelist Patricia Duncker

Book launch celebrating the republication of Mary Gordon's Chase of the Wild Goose.

First published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1936, Gordon's heartfelt homage to the Ladies is the forgotten queer novel of the interwar era.

Sarah Waters has described Chase of the Wild Goose as a "fascinating piece of queer literary history" and a "deeply feminist work, a celebration of courage and nonconformity."

Chase of the Wild Goose joyfully reimagines the life and times of Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, and dreams them back into existence.

Join publisher D-M Withers and acclaimed novelist Patricia Duncker for an unforgettable conversation at Plas Newydd, where the spirit of the Ladies can still be felt intimately, rushing through the grounds.

Patricia Duncker is the author of many critically acclaimed novels including Hallucinating Foucault, James Miranda Barry and Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance.

D-M Withers - Founder of Lurid Editions and Lecturer in Publishing at the University of Exeter

View poster for the event (pdf)

View press release (pdf)

Reserve a free ticket for the event

Read a short review of the event

‍ JUNE 2023

Narrative ethics and character in the representation of the past in Contemporary fiction

Friday 16th and Saturday 17th June 2023, University of Portsmouth UK

Guest speaker: Novelist Patricia Duncker

Following on from the success of Event 1 in Caen in October 2022, this conference further explores how the past is a key component of contemporary literature. Current years have seen an increased return of history and of the historical novel in mainstream fiction, from the historiographic metafictions of the 1990s to the “fresh commitment to what we might call the reality of history” (Boxall 2013) in 21st-century novels. Considering that character remains central to the novel, this two-day conference jointly organised by the Universities of Portsmouth and Caen wishes to address the issue of the past in contemporary fiction through the question of the choice of protagonists and their representation. Indeed, if we believe with Paul Ricoeur that narrative is the foundation of textual memory, if “narrative imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction” since it develops compassion and understanding in the reader (Nussbaum 1998), then the question that begs to be asked is: can one write anything about the past in the name of the freedom of fiction and art or is there an ethical limit to representations of the past in contemporary fiction?

Call For Papers

Abstracts (with a short biographical note) are to be sent to Dr Armelle Parey (ERIBIA,

Université de Caen, France) at armelle.parey@unicaen.fr and Dr Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth, UK) at christine.berberich@port.ac.uk by March 10th 2023. Notifications of acceptance or rejection will be sent within the following fortnight.

JANUARY 2023

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

“A Way Out of the Prison of Gender” Patricia is interviewed in this new Palgrave study edited by Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill.

Marlon James

“Louise Simpson the poet won the Pulitzer. Michelle Cliff, Olive Senior, Mervyn Morris, Patricia Powell, Patricia Duncker; all of these writers have written fantastic and brilliant novels. Patricia Duncker’s Hallucinating Foucault is taught in nearly every gender studies class. We’ve always had writers who’ve had a big influence on American writers, even if they’re not well-known. They are all brilliant and they all have books that deserve more readers.”

Read the Marlon James interview in The Chimes newspaper

‍ SEPTEMBER 2022

Victorian Resurrections

22-24 September 2022. University of Vienna

Death and resurrection as well as the fears, fantasies and fads that surround them, pervade Victorian literature and culture in a myriad of ways. From literary representations of the dead coming back to life, to cultural practices of mourning and memorialising the dead, the Victorian era betrays a striking concern with how to cope with one's mortality.

Patricia will be a keynote speaker at the Victorian literature international conference in September with a paper entitled Resurrecting the Ghost: Victorian Fictions of Revolution, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. For more information see the University of Vienna website.

View conference website

News and Events

Feature

Jenny Newman: In the Blood

Patricia recently interviewed novelist Jenny Newman on the release of her new novel In the Blood. Check out the reviews on Amazon.

News & Events