Beloved in France from an early age, Colette has not always had her originality recognised in Britain a pioneering modernist writer.

In her new book Colette: My Literary Mother, acclaimed author Michèle Roberts examines how Colette invented new forms to express her unsettling content on desire, perversion, ageing, and different forms of love and provocatively used unstable narratives, gaps, silences, fairytale, mythical tropes and sensual evocations of childhood, sex, and landscapes.

Delving into four key texts, Roberts explores Colette's willingness to break open taboos about older woman and desire, as well as hidden and forbidden aspects of human longings and pleasures.

In conversation at this event Deborah Levy, Roberts explores how her re-readings of four key texts revealed Colette's work to be even more entrancing, more disturbing, and more original than she first thought.

Doors and Bar open at 18:00. If you’re attending in person, please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event. Followed by a book stall.

Half price tickets available for Members, Students, Under 26 and other concession groups.

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Michèle Roberts has published fifteen novels and her most recent is Cut Out (2021). Her novel Daughters of the House (1993) won the W.H. Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She has published three collections of short stories and eight of poetry, as well as two memoirs and one collection of essays, Food, Sex & God: on Inspiration and Writing (1998). With the artist Caroline Isgar, she has published four artist's books. She has written two plays, and a short film for Channel 4.

Deborah Levy is the author of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction. Her novels include Swimming Home, Hot Milk, The Man Who Saw Everything (all nominated for the Booker Prize) and most recently, August Blue. Of her Living Autobiography trilogy: Things I Don’t Want To Know,  The Cost of Living and Real Estate, the first two books were awarded  the Prix Femina in France and The Christopher Isherwood Prize in the US. Her collection The Position Of Spoons, will be published in November 2024, by Hamish Hamilton.

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