This conference will include a reading by the acclaimed novelist, Patricia Duncker. Duncker was born in Kingston, Jamaica on 29 June 1951. She attended school in England and, after a period spent working in Germany, she read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She studied for a D.Phil. in English and German Romanticism at St Hugh's College, Oxford. From 1993-2002, she taught Literature at the University of Aberystwyth, and from 2002-2006, has been Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, teaching the MA in Prose Fiction. In January 2007, she moved to the University of Manchester where she is Professor of Modern Literature.

Her first novel, the acclaimed Hallucinating Foucault (1996), won the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize. Set mainly in France, the narrative centres on a Ph.D. student's obsessive search for his subject, the (fictional) French writer Paul Michel. Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees, a collection of short stories exploring themes of desire, jealousy and revenge, was published in 1997 and was shortlisted for the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. James Miranda Barry (1999) is a fictional account of the life of colonial doctor, transvestite, duelist and socialite Barry (1795-1865).

Her third novel, The Deadly Space Between (2002), is a disturbing psychological thriller about 18-year-old Toby Hawk and his mother's enigmatic new lover. A collection of provocative stories, Seven Tales of Sex and Death, was published in 2003. Her latest novel is Miss Webster and Chérif (2006), a comedy of errors set in the post 9/11 world with an indomitable leading character.

 On her own writing practice, Duncker states:

I am a Catholic writer in the Graham Greene mould. He once said of his own work, 'Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things ...' I would say that this is also true of my own writing. I write about people on the edge of society; sexual outlaws, the marginal, the mad, the disguised. I write about psychological extremity, the deadly space between the normal world and damnation. If I had been a writer five hundred years ago I would probably have been a nun and told you, quite calmly, that my main preoccupations were the four last things: Heaven, Hell, Death and the Judgement.

Her critical work includes Sisters and Stranger: An Introduction to Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Blackwell, 1992) and she is co-editor, with Vicky Wilson, of Cancer through the eyes of ten women (Pandora Press, 1996) to which she is also a contributor. She has also published a collection of essays on writing and contemporary literature, Writing on the Wall (Pandora/Rivers Oram, 2002). She has written many articles on contemporary fiction and is a frequent contributor to a variety of BBC Arts Programmes.

Chairing Patricia Duncker: the Novelist, Maureen Freely

Chairing Patricia Duncker's talk will be the novelist Maureen Freely. Freely was born in Neptune, New Jersey, and grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. Since graduating from Harvard in 1974, she has lived mostly in England. She is the author of five novels — Mother's Helper, The Life of the Party, The Stork Club, Under the Vulcania, The Other Rebecca and most recently Enlightenment. She has also published three works of non-fiction. She is the translator of fiction by the Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk. She is a senior lecturer in the Warwick Writing Programme in the Department of English at the University of Warwick. She is also a regular contributor to the Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the Sunday Times, the Independent, the New Statesman and several Turkish magazines.

Links

Interview with Patricia Duncker in The Guardian