Thanks to Jonty Driver for the following
account of our June meeting:
I’ve known Vesna Goldsworthy for a dozen
years, since meeting her at the Writers’ Centre in Norwich and then in a
variety of other contexts. Now, I find it tricky to separate what I’ve learned
about her over the years from what I learned when I listened to her talk to the
Winchelsea Literary Society when it met on Friday 16th June. She isn’t a hugely productive writer: an
academic study, Inventing Ruritania, then a memoir, Chernobyl Strawberries,
then a book of poems, The Angel of Salonika, then the best-selling novel, Gorsky,
a post-modern retelling of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby but now set
among Russian oligarchs in London. It was the last of these which provided the
ostensible reason for her visit to Winchelsea, though in fact she has close
personal links with the area. Her husband’s family had lived in Iden and in Rye
for a good many years, and Vesna and her husband had lived here for a year too.
Part of the reason for her meticulous
output is her busy-ness as an academic: originally employed by the BBC, she then
taught Creative Writing at Kingston University, before becoming head of the
Creative Writing department at UEA, and then opting out of the administrative
demands of that role to teach at Exeter, though she still supervises PhD
students at UEA. Vesna is unusually frank about the demands made on her by
family and career; indeed, one of the things I like best about her is her
un-English habit of answering questions straight, never obliquely. Her language
(now) is English; I suspect her heart
will always be Serbian.
Her intelligence, her sense of a
personal style, her self-critical honesty are all remarkable traits; and I have a sort of hunch that there are
some remarkable novels still to come. I hope there will be some poems too; and
I shall be surprised if the WLS doesn’t queue up to get her back again.
C.J.Driver
A link to the blog of Marian Molteno,
our March speaker:
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