Events at the Shop
Faber Firsts - Sarah Hall and Clare Wigfall
Thursday 9 April 2009
In conversation with journalist Claire Allfree, Sarah Hall and Clare Wigfall read from and discussed their first published work, as part of Faber & Faber’s 80th anniversary celebrations, exploring landscape, feminism, and the slippage between fact and fiction.
“A Real Sense of Impending Loss”
Listen now (21:22)
Claire Allfree introduces Sarah Hall and Clare Wigfall, each of whom reads in turn from their books.
Literary Ventriloquism
Listen now (23:39)
Sarah Hall and Clare Wigfall discuss writing as a means of both escape from oneself and exploration of the other, the links between language and landscape, the short story form, and the challenges of weaving ‘true stories’ into fiction.
“Sometimes You Have to Get Rid of the Foot”: Audience Questions
Listen now (20:00)
Audience questions on:
- The discipline required to leave things out when writing historical stories
- The arbitrary distinctions made between story forms
- How feminism has informed their writing
- To what extent Hall and Wigfall feel like “Faber authors”
Recorded and edited by Adrian Leibowitz and Brett Wilson
Common Custom:documentary & archive
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She is the author of four novels, including Haweswater, which won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award, and a Lakeland Book of the Year prize, and most recently, the Man Booker-longlisted How to Paint a Dead Man. Her work has been translated into many languages. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and a radio adaptation of her third novel.
Clare Wigfall’s debut collection of short stories The Loudest Sound and Nothing was published in 2007 to critical acclaim. In 2008 she won the internationally renowned BBC National Short Story Award for ‘The Numbers’, one of the stories from her collection. She currently lives in Berlin.
Further Reading
If you enjoyed this event, you may also be interested in:
Iain Sinclair - Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire