Lara Atkin's Page

As this year's Literary London Reading Group sessions draw to a close, we are very pleased to announce that Professor Jane Rendell will introduce our final session 'Site-Writing: Trafalgar Square, Fallujah, and the Truman Brewery'. This will take place on Tuesday, 18 June 2013 from 6.00pm-7:30pm in Senate House Rm 234 Trafalgar Square: DétournementsJane Rendell's essay 'Trafalgar Square: Détournements'  published in Site-Writing (2010) was originally written as a talk commissioned by the…See More

After our first session spent delving into the ruins of blitzed London (thanks to Sebastian Groes for giving a great talk on Bowen and Macaulay) we’re very pleased to announce that Andrew Whitehead will be introducing our second event:‘Trouble in Porter Street: a rent strike manual in fictional form.’ This will take place on Tuesday, 20th November from 6:00-7:30pm in Senate House Room 234.When the communist novelist John Sommerfield was asked to write an account of how to organise a rent…See More

We're very pleased to announce that Sebastian Groes (University of Roehampton) will be introducing our first event: "The Fantastic Ruined City": Blitzed London’s Ruins in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day' This will take place on Tuesday, 16th October from 6:00-7:30pm in Senate House Room 234.This Literary London Reading Group session focuses on two novels which pay acute attention to the ways in which Blitzed London temporarily offers different…See More

Writer and environmentalist Ken Worpole has kindly agreed to introduce our first session in which we will be having a butchers hook (sorry) at the figure of the gangster in literary imaginings of the East End. Using Alexander Baron’s King Dido (1969), and Iain Sinclair’s depiction of Ronnie Kray’s funeral in Lights Out for the Territory (1997) as our points of departure, we will examine how these writers engage with and complicate a reading…See More