February 2023
Berlin-bound: British Council Germany welcomes five exceptional UK writers to its 38th Literature Seminar
The annual British Council Literature Seminar in Germany has presented eminent UK writers and new literary voices for over 30 years. We have explored British crime writing, UK literature in the context of race and gender, Nature Writing from the UK, and, of course, Shakespeare. From 2020 to 2022, we held dedicated seminars on literature from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland respectively.
This year’s British Council Literature Seminar will be on Class and Contemporary UK Writing, and we are thrilled that Bernardine Evaristo OBE will chair the event. Bernardine is the author of ten books, including her memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up. She won the Booker Prize 2019 with her novel Girl, Woman, Other – the first black woman and black British person to win it.
The seminar will take place on 16–18 March 2023 at Oyoun in Berlin-Neukölln. Bernardine will be joined by Kit de Waal, Daljit Nagra, Joelle Taylor and Wayne Holloway-Smith. It will consist of readings, a panel discussion and four author-led workshops. We will offer a live stream of selected events.
Bernardine Evaristo said, ‘The hierarchy of class is deeply embedded into the structures of British society and affects every aspect of our lives. […] The British Council Literature Seminar 2023 will provide a space for fertile discussion of what it means to be a writer from working-class backgrounds […] and the importance of representation at all levels within the literature industry.’
Since its beginnings, the seminar has introduced over 200 contemporary writers from the UK to a German audience. Over the years, participating writers have included Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Angela Carter, Val McDermid, Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson, with chairs including A S Byatt, Michèle Roberts, Ali Smith and Glenn Patterson.
You can register and find the schedule on the British Council website. Join the conversation on Twitter using #BritLit23.
For further information, please contact: press@britishcouncil.de
About the British Council
The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. We support peace and prosperity by building connections, understanding and trust between people in the UK and countries worldwide. We do this through our work in arts and culture, education and the English language. We work with people in over 200 countries and territories and are on the ground in more than 100 countries. In 2021–22 we reached 650 million people.
About the writers
Bernardine Evaristo OBE
Bernardine Evaristo is the author of ten books, including her memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (2021). She won the Booker Prize 2019 with her novel Girl, Woman, Other, the first black woman and black British person to win it. A #1 Sunday Times bestseller for five weeks, it spent 44 weeks in the Top 10 and has sold over a million copies. There are 60 translations of her books in over forty languages. Bernardine has received many other awards and honours, including two British Book Awards. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, an International Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, President of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance and President of the Royal Society of Literature.
Kit de Waal
Kit de Waal was brought up among the Irish community of Birmingham in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017. Her second novel, The Trick to Time, was longlisted for the Women's Prize and her young adult novel Becoming Dinah was shortlisted for the Carnegie CLIP Award 2020. A collection of short stories, Supporting Cast, was published in 2020. An anthology of working-class writing, Common People, was crowdfunded and edited by Kit in 2019. Her memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes was published in August 2022.
Daljit Nagra MBE
Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, Council of Society of Authors, a PBS New Generation Poet, and presenter of the weekly Poetry Extra on Radio 4 Extra, Daljit Nagra MBE has published four poetry collections, all with Faber & Faber, which have won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem and Best First Book, the South Bank Show Decibel Award and the Cholmondeley Award, and been shortlisted for the Costa Prize and twice for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Joelle Taylor
Joelle Taylor is the author of four collections of poetry. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. She is a co-curator and host of Out-Spoken Live, a resident at the Southbank Centre, and an editor at Out-Spoken Press. Her novel of interconnecting stories, The Night Alphabet, will be published by Quercus in the spring of 2024, followed by her memoirs. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year.
Wayne Holloway-Smith
Wayne Holloway-Smith has published two collections of poetry, Alarum (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), which was a Poetry Book Society Wildcard Choice, and Love Minus Love (Bloodaxe Books, 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ledbury Munte Prize for Best Second Collection. He won the National Poetry Competition in 2018, The Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2016, and currently edits The Poetry Review.