Reading, Writing and Looking: A Workshop with Tessa Hadley

We're thrilled to offer a part-workshop, part-talk from Tessa Hadley, centred around the author's new literary study Alone with a Book.

For as long as Tessa Hadley can remember, life has been made vivid by reading. Reading was not an escape, but rather reading about life seemed to enhance the edges and details of living: the ordinary world, with its corners, routines and small dramas, came into focus through the stories she loved.

In these precise and energising essays, Hadley turns to the books and the art that have animated her life, and asks what it means to connect with one book over another. Ranging across the works of Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen, Alice Munro, J.M. Coetzee and Leila Slimani and more, Hadley returns to the enduring power of realism – as a craft, a joy, and a way of relating to the world, where life is made richer, deeper, and more fully imagined through fiction.

A note from Tessa on the workshop portion of the event:

Tessa will bring in a couple of paragraphs from books she loves. “Together we’ll explore what makes this writing original and strong, what draws us in and moves us (or fails to). We’ll discuss how reading well relates to writing well, and just how inseparable these two are. And we’ll end the workshop by actually having a go at an ‘imitation’ of the pieces we’ve just read. This ‘copying’ can really work as a way to strengthen your own writing, push your expression to places you didn’t know it could go, tap your own deeper resources of seeing and imagining."

Tessa Hadley is the author of several highly praised novels, including Accidents in the Home, longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and Free Love. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, and her book The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.