Festival of Ideas: Mary Shelley: The Writer

Mary Shelley is known worldwide for her novel Frankenstein but she wrote and published much more. A life often seen in the context of her parents – philosopher William Godwin and feminist and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft – and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, she was a remarkable travel writer, literary historian, poet, short-story writer, editor and critic. Her other books include History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (about Europe), Valperga and Perkin Warbeck (historical novels) and the science fiction The Last Man. Our panel explores the Shelley outside of Frankenstein and debates her continuing impact. Speakers include: Poet and writer John Burnside; writer Daisy Hay, author of Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives; poet and biographer Fiona Sampson, whose On the White Plain: The Search for Mary Shelley will be published in 2017; and writer, abridger and director Sara Davies, who has adapted the novel Frankenstein for our special performances in the New Rooms this weekend.

Speaker biographies:

John Burnside
John Burnside’s collection, Black Cat Bone, won both the Forward and TS Eliot Prizes for 2012. His most recent poetry collection is All One Breath. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews, but is currently a DAAD fellow in Berlin, where he is working on a new novel.

Sara Davies
After 20 years producing documentaries, arts features and drama for BBC Audio and Music , Sara Davies is now a freelance writer, abridger and director. She has recently written two drama documentaries and co-written a drama series for Radio 4, and is currently producing a feature for Radio 3’s Between the Ears and a series of short stories about migration and exile for Radio 4’s World on the Move season. She has won the Mental Health Media award for radio drama twice and the Radio Academy Gold Award for Best Feature.

Daisy Hay
Daisy Hay is the author of Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, for which she was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy and highly commended by the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2009-2010 she was the Alistair Horne Fellow at St Anthony’s College, Oxford and in 2010-2012 she held a visiting scholarship at Wolfson College, Oxford. In 2012-2013 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. She is currently a lecturer in English Literature and Archival Studies at the University of Exeter, and a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker.

Fiona Sampson
Fiona Sampson’s publications include 27 volumes of poetry, criticism and philosophy of language, and she has been published in more than 30 languages. She has received the Newdigate Prize, the Cholmondeley Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, Kathleen Blundell and Oppenheimer-John Downes Awards from the Society of Authors, a number of Writer’s Awards from both the English and the Welsh Arts Councils, and various Poetry Book Society commendations. She has been short-listed twice for both the TS Eliot Prize and the Forward Prizes. Recent books include a new edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Faber) and Coleshill (Chatto), and she is currently working on Lyric Cousins: Musical Form in Poetry, for Edinburgh University Press (2016), and On the White Plain: The Search for Mary Shelley, for Profile Books (2017). Her new collection The Catch (Chatto) will be released in February 2016. Profile Books (2017). Her new collection The Catch (Chatto) will be released in February 2016.

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