Please join the Brasenose College Frankland Visitor, Joanna Kavenna, for a panel discussion with her guest speakers, Eliane Glaser, Benjamin Markovits and Phil Tinline.
We live in a world of fake news, misinformation, facts that abruptly become fictions (and vice versa). How can we fathom what is real and unreal? Who can we trust? What place do the creative arts have in a reality that is (far) stranger than fiction? A panel discussion with Eliane Glaser (BBC producer and author), Kirsty Gunn (author and RLF fellow),
Joanna Kavenna and Benjamin Markovits (author and Professor at Royal Holloway).
Joanna Kavenna is a prize-winning author whose novels include ZED, The Ice Museum, Inglorious, The Birth of Love and A Field Guide to Reality. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Zoetrope and the Paris Review among other publications. Kavenna’s writing has garnered the Orange Prize for New Writing, the Alistair Horne and Harper-Wood Fellowships and she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.
Eliane Glaser writes widely on political propaganda, manipulation, and has decades of experience as a BBC producer including on Front Row, Start the Week and Free Thinking. Eliane’s books include Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life, about how ideology works in contemporary politics, culture and media. She writes comment pieces and reviews for a number of publications, including The Guardian, The Independent, The New Statesman and The London Review of Books.
Benjamin Markovits is the author of seven novels including Either Side of Winter and You Don’t Have to Live Like This. He has published essays, stories, poetry and reviews on subjects ranging from the Romantics to American sports in the Guardian, Granta, The Paris Review and The New York Times. In 2013 Granta selected him as one of their Best of Young British Novelists and in 2015 he won the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Phil Tinline is a leading producer of historical narrative documentaries. His extensive work for BBC Radio 4 explored such themes as the struggles of working-class Tories, the ‘revolutions’ of 1968, the birth of the EU, Orwell’s road to Nineteen Eighty Four, a 1981 NATO nuclear wargame and brainwashing, and has involved conducting a large number of interviews with politicians past and present. He has written for the Independent on Sunday, the Observer, the Guardian, BBC History Magazine and the New Statesman. His first book, The Death of Consensus, is published by Hurst and was named by The Times as their Politics Book of the Year in 2022.
