The Sylvia Townsend Warner Lecture took place on 18^th October this year at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and also as an online webinar.

This bi-annual lecture run by The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society and supported by UCL Press, offers the opportunity to hear from acclaimed writers whose work touches on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s life and works. This year the lecture was given by Claire Harman on the theme of ‘The true voice of the heart’: capture and evasiveness in Sylvia Townsend Warner's life and work.

Claire Harman is an award-winning writer and critic, and the author of seven major literary biographies. She is renowned for her pioneering work on Sylvia Townsend Warner including a major biography published in 1989. She has taught English at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford and creative writing at Columbia University in New York City. She is now Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 2006. In 2016 Claire became President of The Alliance of Literary Societies.

The previous three Sylvia Townsend Warner Lectures were given by Maud Ellmann (2017), Peter Swaab (2019) and David Trotter (2021) and are published by UCL Press in The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society and are freely available to read online as open access publications:

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’s lecture is available to watch online now and will also be published as an article in the journal from December 2024.

The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society is a peer reviewed, open access journal, published by UCL Press, aiming to create a wider interest in the life and works of Sylvia Townsend Warner. Scholarly articles and pieces by well-known contemporary writers describing their appreciation of Warner are published alongside previously unpublished archival works by Warner. Warner (1893-1978) was a writer of novels, short stories and poems, and a contemporary of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. Her first novel Lolly Willowes (1926) established her as a new literary talent and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina. She contributed short stories to the New Yorker for more than forty years, and went on to write six more novels. Her reputation was re-established in the 1970s, when her work was published by the newly launched Virago Modern Classics imprint.

Links

The Journal of the Society of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society: https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/stw/

The Society of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society: https://townsendwarner.com

UCL Press: https://www.uclpress.co.uk

Sylvia Townsend Warner Clare Harman Maud Ellmann Peter Swaab David Trotter Lolly Willowes