10-26 May
Become a FriendThe Winner Takes It All?
Anjali Joseph, Preti Taneja & Evie Wyld
Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2020 has been cancelled
It is with regret that we have taken the very difficult but ultimately inevitable decision to cancel the 2020 Norfolk & Norwich Festival.
With the rapidly escalating health-crisis and with the safety of our audiences, staff and artists at heart, we have taken the decision that it is impossible for us to deliver the Festival this May.
If you have booked a ticket for the Festival, you do not need to do anything. You are entitled to a refund and we will be in touch soon. Please bear with us during this difficult time. If you have the capacity to make a donation of part or all of your ticket value, we would be extremely grateful – it would help ensure we’re well-placed to support artists and be able to present future Festivals.
Who decides what is prize-worthy, and how does prize culture fit within the state of society today? We’re joined by Anjali Joseph, Preti Taneja and Evie Wyld to discuss and debate whether the current prize model is working, and how judges may need to adapt in order to survive.
‘Joseph’s is a deep and unusual talent; she attends to questions for which not every novelist is equipped. The Living is an exceptional, unexpected work’ – Amit Chaudhuri, Guardian
‘Brilliant… finely crafted… Taneja has given us that rarest of beasts: a page-turner that is also unabashedly political.’ – Guardian
‘One of our most gifted novelists.’ – The Observer on Evie Wyld
‘For once, the hype matches the talent.’ – Sunday Times on Evie Wyld
In association with the Desmond Elliott Prize, part of the National Centre for Writing’s Early Career Awards programme.
Important information
Duration: 1 hour
About the speakers
Anjali Joseph was born in Bombay in 1978. She read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has taught English at the Sorbonne. More recently she wrote for the Times of India in Bombay and was Commissioning Editor for ELLE (India). She graduated from the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2008. Her first novel, Saraswati Park, was published by 4th Estate in 2010; it won the Betty Trask Prize, Desmond Elliott Prize, and Vodafone Crossword Book Award for Fiction in India. Another Country, her second novel, was published in June 2012. Her third novel, The Living, was published by 4th Estate in March 2016.
Preti Taneja was born and grew up in the UK. She teaches writing in prisons and in universities, and has worked with youth charities and in conflict and post conflict zones on minority and cultural rights. She is the co-founder of ERA Films, and of Visual Verse, the anthology of art and words. Her debut novel We That Are Young won the Desmond Elliott Prize and was a Sunday Times Book of the Year.
Evie Wyld was born in London and grew up in Australia and South London. She studied creative writing at Bath Spa and Goldsmiths University. Her first novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, the Commonwealth Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award. In 2013 she was included on Granta Magazine’s once a decade Best of Young British Novelists list. Her second novel All the Birds, Singing won the Miles Franklin Award, the Encore Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Sky Arts Times Breakthrough Award and longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. She runs Review, a small independent bookshop in Peckham, south London.
Tickets
City of Literature Weekend is a Norfolk & Norwich Festival and National Centre for Writing presentation, programmed by National Centre for Writing.
