Settee Seminars Ilkley Literature Festival

This talk was recorded at the University of Leeds in 2023. To find out more, visit the University of Leeds website.

The centenary of the birth of Italo Calvino, the most widely translated Italian author of the 20th century, was in 2023. The Italian critic Domenico Scarpa marked the centenary with his magisterial publication (Calvino fa la conchiglia. La costruzione di uno scrittore, Hoepli, 2023) and here explores the popularity of Calvino in the anglophone world. Starting from the ‘The Spiral’, the cosmicomic story about the construction of a self which is a constant narrative theme for Calvino (and the inspiration for Scarpa’s book’s title), the conversation moves back in time to the fantastic novellas of Our Ancestors from the 1950s then forward to Invisibile cities, which in 1972 established Calvino's international reputation, finally concluding with If on a winter’s night a traveller (1979) and Mr Palomar (1983). Using as a springboard the commentaries of writers who admired Calvino, including Gore Vidal, John Barth, Salman Rushdie and Semaus Heaney, the timeless qualities that make Calvino’s works so beloved outside Italy and so pertinent to understanding our contemporary world are investigated.

This talk was recorded at the 2023 Ilkley Literature Festival. To find out more about the festival, visit our website.


When Charles Darwin arrived in Ilkley in October 1859, he had just finished working on his epochal book On the Origin of Species. After his monumental labours, he looked forward to restoring his body and mind in the Northern home of “the water cure”. But his nine-week visit turned out to be socially and intellectually lively, in ways that illuminate the man and his times, and even the enigmatic illness that plagued him.

In this talk, Mike Dixon and Gregory Radick share new evidence on what Darwin got up to on his journey to the North and what he took away for his future scientific work.

This podcast was recorded as part of the 2023 Ilkley Literature Festival. To find out more about the festival, visit our website.

In a conversation with Susan Pitter, award-winning writers Alex Wheatle and Colin Grant come together to discuss their personal experiences of being Black in Britain; the people, places, and music they turned to navigate their identity and the racism they faced.

Wheatle’s Sufferah explores his childhood marred by abuse – with no knowledge of his Jamaican parentage or family history – his imprisonment as a young man protesting systemic racism and police brutality, and how he found salvation and comfort in reggae.

Grant’s I’m Black So You Don’t Have To Be explores the lives of his family members – from his mother’s longing to return to Jamaica, to his sister who refashioned herself as an African princess – and the impact they had on Grant’s own shifting sense of self.

When we think about World War Two or the Holocaust, our minds go to those who fought or were deported to the camps. In this literary dialogue, Helen Finch and Alessio Baldini bring to you the voices of those writers who were left behind.

Natalia Ginzburg was 28 and the mother of three when her husband, Leone Ginzburg (an Italian Jew of Ukrainian descent) died in prison after being beaten by the Gestapo. The Ginzburg family had lived in ‘confino’ (internal exile) for a few years. As an Italian Jew, Natalia was now in hiding with her children to flee persecution. She survived to become one of the most important writers in post-war Italy. In her writings, she explores how vulnerability and dependence make us human, and often returns to how the war years have shaped her outlook on life.

Contemporary writer Katja Petrowskaja, a Jewish writer born in Ukraine and writing in German, explores narratives of Jewish family history in Ukraine and Germany before and after the Holocaust. Her major work Maybe Esther (tr. Shelley Frisch, 2014) traces the impossibility of reconstructing the lives of her family members who were destroyed in the Holocaust. More recently, Petrowskaja’s journalism from Berlin traces the connections between the Nazi invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s current war on Ukraine, started in 2022.

What do people think about when they hear China and Tibet in the same sentence? They often think of the traumatic experiences of surveillance, self-immolations, repression of religious expression, and international accusations of cultural genocide. Rarely will they think of traditional humour, and modern comedy disseminated in audiovisual media. But laughter is more characteristic of the everyday Tibetan experience, and attending to Tibetan humor and comedy can help us understand contemporary Tibetan experience in contemporary China. Interspersed with clips in the original Tibetan, Tim Thurston and collaborator Tsering Samdrup will discuss their preparation of a book of translated Tibetan comedic scripts, and how these comedies can help provide a nuanced understanding of the complexities of everyday Tibetan experience in twentieth and twenty-first century China.

In this talk, you'll be introduced to a selection of fictional works, translated into English, that are based on the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). With Daisy Towers, PhD student from the University of Leeds, learn about how the war inspired numerous authors to draw on their experiences and the position of translated literature in the English literary sphere.

 

About Daisy Towers

Daisy Towers is a PhD student at the University of Leeds, her research focuses on world literature and the translations into English of the Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda.