Award-winning novelists take centre stage at Festival
Dramatist Samuel Beckett provided the inspiration for readings
by two leading international novelists as York celebrates its first Festival of
Ideas.
Nobel Laureate J M Coetzee made a rare public appearance in York on Friday, 24 June, while fellow novelist John Banville, a winner of the Booker Prize, visited the city on Thursday, 23 June.
The York Festival of Ideas, which runs until Sunday 10 July, is a partnership between the University of York, York Theatre Royal, the National Centre for Early Music, York St John University and York Museums Trust. It brings together the themes of Beckett, the Body and the Bible, with a range of world-class speakers, exhibitions, and artistic performances exploring a series of intriguing links between past and present as well as showcasing contemporary ideas, arts and culture.
South African-born J M Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and read from work in progress. He is one of only two novelists to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice: for Life and Times of Michael K in 1983 and for Disgrace in 1999. His non-fiction works include White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa and Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews.
Irish novelist and screenwriter John Banville is the author of remarkable novels such as The Book of Evidence and The Sea. He is a philosophical novelist fascinated by the nature of perception and the conflict between imagination and reality. He is greatly influenced by Samuel Beckett’s work and like Beckett, he moves fluidly from Irish landscapes and characters to European contexts and histories, and between conventional narratives and dazzling worlds of fable and distortion. As well as a reading, the evening included an interview where Banville reflected on Beckett’s legacy.
John Coetzee gained degrees in English and Mathematics at the University of Cape Town where he studied from 1957. From 1962 to 1965 he lived in England, working as a computer programmer while doing research for a thesis on the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. In 1969 he graduated from the University of Texas with a PhD in English, Linguistics, and Germanic languages. His doctoral dissertation was on Beckett’s early fiction. After working at academic institutions in the USA and South Africa, he moved to Australia in 2002 and holds an honorary position at the University of Adelaide.
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He was educated at a Christian Brothers’ School and St. Peter's College, Wexford. He worked in journalism from 1969 and was a sub-editor at The Irish Press and later at The Irish Times. He was Literary Editor at The Irish Times from 1988 to 1999. His work for the theatre includes adaptations of three of Heinrich von Kleist's plays: The Broken Jug (1994), God’s Gift (2000), and Love in the Wars (2005). He worked with director Neil Jordan on The End of the Affair and adapted Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Last September for a film directed by Deborah Warner (both 1999).
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