This is an in-person only event in the British Library Pigott Theatre.

How would we like to be remembered after our death? What do we want to leave behind? Have we started thinking of what we want our legacy to be? We bring together an exciting panel of artists, writers and historians who join artist Kit Green for a dive into the idea of “personal legacy”, using the art that we love as a starting off point.

This event is inspired by Kit’s National Lottery Heritage Fund supported digital project, What Will Survive Us. This is a platform where users can curate, create or commission six piece of art. Made up of images, sound recordings, videos or anything that can be uploaded, this living will can be created by any person of any age. It is a creative and hopeful process that can be constantly revised. The aim is to develop a national digital heritage platform, empowering diverse communities to leave a lasting and creative legacy.

This event invites our panel to think about what they would upload and to reflect on legacy more generally.

Kit Green is an Olivier-Award-winning working across theatre, entertainment, and social care. Her major piece The Home was a 48-hour experiential show and re-imagined as an interactive game, in collaboration with the Japan Foundation, exploring the politics and lived experience of residential care in both the UK and Japan through digital entertainment. www.kitgreen.net

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If you’re attending in person, please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event.

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Rowan Williams is Honorary Professor of Contemporary Christian Thought at the University of Cambridge.  Dr Williams spent his early career as an academic theologian at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, before he was elected Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales.  He served as the 104^th Archbishop of Canterbury for a decade from 2002; on stepping down he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Williams of Oystermouth.  In 2013 he was elected Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, from which he retired in 2020.

Rowan Williams has published on a wide range of theological, historical and political themes.  His first book was a translation from French; he has also co-translated a multi-volume theological work from German, and poetry from Russian and Welsh, including most recently The Book of Taliesin for Penguin Classics (2019, with Gwyneth Lewis).  He has published several poetry collections, and his Collected Poems were published by Carcanet in 2021.

The Sebald Lecture is given annually on an aspect of literature in translation and is named after W.G. Sebald who set up BCLT in 1989.  ‘Max’ was a German writer who opted to live in the UK and continue writing in German.  His novels and essays include The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz and On the Natural History of Destruction, and they established him as a leading writer of the 20th century.