12th July - Tom Lee and Ross Raisin in conversation
Posted 11:50, 12 July 2018
Join us on 12th July for an evening of reading and discussion with Tom Lee and Ross Raisin.
Tom Lee's writing has appeared in the Sunday Times, Esquireand Prospect in the UK, the Dublin Review in Ireland and in Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope All Story in the United States, among others. In 2012 he was shortlisted for the Sunday TimesEFG Private Bank Short Story Award. He has also been awarded the Royal Society of Literature's Brookleaze Grant and two Arts Council grants for his fiction. He currently teaches undergraduate and postgraduate creative writing at Goldsmiths College.
James Orr - husband, father, reliable employee and all round model citizen - wakes one morning to find himself quite transformed. There's no way he can go into the office, and the doctors aren't able to help. Waiting for the affliction to pass, he wanders the idyllic estate where he lives, with its pretty woodland, uniform streets and perfectly manicured lawns. But there are cracks in the veneer. And as his orderly existence begins to unravel, it appears thatJames himself may not be the man he thought he was.
A story that consistently confounds expectations, The Alarming Palsy of James Orrintroduces a writer of extraordinary and disturbing talents.
Ross Raisin is the author of three novels: A Natural (2017),Waterline (2011) and God’s Own Country (2008). In 2013 he was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and he has been the recipient of several other awards, including The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (2009), and been shortlisted for various others, including the IMPAC Dublin literary award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. He has written short stories for Granta, Prospect, the Sunday Times, Esquire, BBC Radio Three and Four, among others, and has contributed to anthologies including Best British Short Stories. Ross also teaches on the UEA/Guardian Masterclasses programme, and is a writer-in-residence for the education charity First Story.
Tom has always known exactly the person he is going to be. A successful footballer. A man others look up to. Now, though, the bright future he imagined for himself is threatened.
The Premier League academy of his boyhood has let him go. At nineteen, Tom finds himself playing for a tiny club in a town he has never heard of. But as he navigates his isolation and his desperate need for recognition, a sudden and thrilling encounter offers him the promise of an escape, and Tom is forced to question whether he can reconcile his supressed desires with his dreams of success.
A Natural delves into the heart of a professional football club: the pressure, the loneliness, the threat of scandal, the fragility of the body and the struggle, on and off the pitch, with conforming to the person that everybody else expects you to be.
As always tickets cost £5 which includes a glass of wine and £4 off purchases made on the night.