Iain Sinclair » talks

Lincoln University, 21st century writing conference

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:00:50 +0000

“What is happening now in 21st century writing, drama and theatrical performance? Who have emerged as the significant and innovative writers and performers in the first decade of the new millennium? Is it possible to track and trace new trends, characteristics and paradigms in work published and performed since 2000? What older preoccupations and traditions remain structuring features of 21st century writing and theatrical performance? What are the key concerns of critical theory over the last ten years?

This conference aims to address some of these questions and to provide a focus and forum for those interested in what writing and drama have to say in the new millennium.”

Website

Iain Sinclair in Conversation with Martin Karlsson, Tate modern

admin — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 13:00:45 +0000

“Iain Sinclair, chronicler of London, writer, documentarist, filmmaker, poet, flaneur, metropolitan prophet and keeper of lost cultures, is in conversation with Martin Karlsson, who has created a project on the 100-metre hoarding that encloses the building works for the extension to Tate Modern.London – An Imagery 2008–9 takes as its starting point Gustave Doré’s gothic etchings published in 1872. Karlsson updates this portrait of the city and its inhabitants.”

Website

Iain Sinclair at the World Literature Weekend

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:00:16 +0000

Saturday 19 June at 7 p.m. London Review Bookshop, £8

Yang Lian, Brian Holton and Iain Sinclair

“Yang Lian begins his latest collection, Lee Valley Poems (Bloodaxe), with the statement, ‘There is no international, only different locals’. He began writing traditional poetry while it was proscribed during the Cultural Revolution, and later became a founder of the Misty school of poetry, the underground group centred around the literary magazine Jintian. He was exiled from China after the Tiananmen Square massacre; he is now at home in Stoke Newington and the Lea Valley. His poems collapse distances by combining a deep attention to the particular with the allusiveness of classical Chinese poetry, in which a word or image can contain all of tradition: ‘With the cry of a wild goose, I am drawn into the Tang Dynasty at the instant of hearing, making Lee valley’s waters flow twelve hundred years upstream.’

Yang Lian will be in conversation with his translator, Brian Holton, and Iain Sinclair, poet, documentary-novelist and East Londoner.”

Event website

See the event brochure

‘Lost London’ – explorations of a dark metropolis, Sheffield Hallam University

admin — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:00:14 +0000

‘Lost London’ – explorations of a dark metropolis

Monday 14 – Tuesday 15 June 2010
Sheffield Hallam University

“This interdisciplinary conference engages with the writings of Iain Sinclair. Following his interest in London writers, it proposes a vision of London that concentrates on the marginal, the ‘lost’, and the ‘underground’. It takes an interdisciplinary form spanning the disciplines of history, English, film and architecture.

The London it hopes to explore is an unstable and shifting one, which changes its meanings over time. The chronology is a long one, inviting comparisons across the geographical spaces of London and across disciplinary boundaries.

Drawing on Iain Sinclair‘s preoccupations with space, topography, the cinema of the capital and the lost history of the city, it aims to overturn accepted notions of London through an emphasis on the excluded.

The conference will be held in conjunction with the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield, and will open a week-long series of short films about London. These will be a series of films introduced by academic staff from Sheffield Hallam University at the Showroom Cinema.

Iain Sinclair will be present and will deliver a keynote lecture on outsider culture in London and popular film making in the 1960s and 70s.”

Panel discussion: Restless Cities, Whitechapel Gallery, London

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:00:53 +0000

Price: £7.00

Thursday 10 June, 7pm

“To mark the publication of Restless Cities, editorsMatthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart are joined by contributors Marshall Berman, Geoff Dyer and Iain Sinclair to discuss the metropolis as a site of endless making and unmaking of identities. How can explorations of phenomena including nightwalking, urbicide, property, commuting and recycling help us to trace the patterns that have defined everyday life in the modern city and its effect on us as individuals?”