June 2017 News

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:

http://www.marionmolteno.co.uk/marionsblog/2017/reading-to-the-swans/