Alexandra Harris | The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape
Sat 23 Nov 2024 | 10:00am - 11:00am
Join acclaimed writer and cultural historian Alexandra Harris for a rich journey into The Rising Down, a luminous feat of time travel which chronicles past lives from a Sussex landscape.
When the celebrated critic returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, Alexandra Harris realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area’s past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see?
From the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to the lost local women who left little trace, these electrifying stories inspired her to imagine lives that seemed distant, yet were deeply connected through their shared landscape.
In conversation with art historian Ruth Scurr
Venue: Old Divinity School
Duration: 1 hour
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Author Biography
Alexandra Harris is an acclaimed writer, literary critic and cultural historian. She was educated at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute and worked for ten years at the University of Liverpool. She Is now Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (2010) won the Guardian First Book Award, a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize. Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (2015) was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and adapted for BBC Radio 4. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Harris reviews for the Guardian and other newspapers as well as writing for exhibition catalogues, working with artists and lecturing widely.
Chair
Ruth Scurr is a writer, historian and literary critic and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College. Her first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize (2006), was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize (2006), long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize (2007) and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times in 2009. Her second book, John Aubrey: My own Life was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Biography Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ruth writes widely for (including for The Times, the Times Literary Supplement, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, The New Statesman, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The Guardian. She judged on the Man Booker Prize panel, 2007; the Samuel Johnson Prize panel, 2014; and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize panel, 2014, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and member of the Folio Prize Academy. Ruth is an honorary patron of the festival.
