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The 2025 Sylvia Townsend Warner Lecture
Posted by The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society editorial office on 2025-10-02
Wednesday 22 October 2025, 5.30 - 7pm (GMT)
Join us for the 2025 Sylvia Townsend Warner Lecture and hear from our guest speaker Dr Harriet Baker.
The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is very pleased to announce that Dr Harriet Baker will be giving the 2025 Sylvia Townsend Warner Lecture on Wednesday 22 October 2025 at 5.30pm. Her subject is 'Sylvia Townsend Warner's Old Teapot: Archives, Objects and Life-Writing'.
Harriet Baker is a writer, critic and Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her work has appeared in the London Review of Books, Paris Review, New Statesman and the Financial Times. Her first book, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, was published by Allen Lane in 2024. It was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize and the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award.
Previous Sylvia Townsend Warner Lectures have been given by Maud Ellmann (2017), Peter Swaab (2019), David Trotter (2021) and Claire Harman (2023), and later published as open access publications by UCL Press in The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society and the 2023 and 2021 lectures are also available to watch online:
Maud Ellmann (2017) ‘After the Death of Don Juan: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Spanish Novel’
Peter Swaab (2019) ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Possibilities of Freedom: The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society Lecture 2019’
David Trotter (2021) ‘"My Usual Despicable Hold on Life”: The View from Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Diaries'
Claire Harmen (2023) ‘The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society Lecture 2023: ‘The True Voice of the Heart’: Capture and Evasiveness in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Life and Work’.
Registration information
Registration is free and tickets are offered first come first served. The lecture will take place both online and in person at UCL (University College London, UK) in the Institute of Advanced Studies, Room G11 Ground Floor, South Wing Wilkins Building, Gower Street WC1E 6BT. Please register your attendance here by completing the Eventbrite form, found in the below links:
In person (limited to 65 registrants): https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-2025-sylvia-townsend-warner-lecture-in-person-tickets-1761261794439
The event is supported by UCL Press, the UCL English Department and the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies.
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