Join the team behind The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society for a two-day international conference celebrating the centenary of Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first and best-known novel.

First published in 1926, Lolly Willowes explores themes of freedom, gender, and religion in a distinctive and thought-provoking way. As a serious and imaginative fantasy, it stands as a strikingly original contribution to literary modernism, written in the same decade as James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. This conference places Warner’s novel at the centre of that landscape and opens up new perspectives on its significance and enduring relevance.

Organised in collaboration with the UCL English Department, UCL Press, and the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, the conference features a keynote lecture by the novelist Adam Mars-Jones. The programme also brings together poets and fiction writers Philip Hensher, Juliet McKenna, and Deryn Rees-Jones, alongside the American composer Michael Alec Rose, who will present excerpts from his 2019 chamber opera Lolly Willowes.

Day tickets are available to purchase for either individual days or the whole conference.

Lolly Willowes at 100: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Religion and the Supernatural: Friday 29 and Saturday 30 May, IAS Common Ground, South Wing, UCL Wilkins Building

Find out more and book your place: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanities/events/2026/may/lolly-willowes-100-sylvia-townsend-warner-religion-and-supernatural

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