This post was contributed by Dennis Duncan, a PhD student in Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities.
Last summer I organised the first international conference on contemporary British novelist Tom McCarthy. McCarthy’s novels explore themes of repetition and duplication, failed transcendence, the notion of matter, and transmission, and his third novel C was shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize.
As well as a number of prestigious academic speakers, we were lucky enough to get McCarthy himself to come and give a reading from his upcoming novel, before taking part in a long question and answer session. The idea came after some colleagues of mine in the Department of English and Humanities organised a similar conference for the American writer Jonathan Lethem last year – it made for a really interesting event to have Lethem present while academics discussed his work. I had already been in touch with McCarthy, trying to get him to come along for the launch of Dandelion – the journal run out of Birkbeck’s School of Arts. He wasn’t able to attend that time, but his response had been friendly, so I thought it would be worth trying again to get him along!
