PEN, Justice and the Creative Process

Readings and discussion with Writer in Residence, Gillian Slovo, and South African crime writer, Margie Orford

Gillian Slovo is the John Tilney Writer in Residence at York this term.  Born in South Africa, she is the author of twelve novels and her best selling family memoir Every Secret Thing.  Her novel, Red Dust, set around a fictional hearing of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, won the RFI Temoin du Monde prize in France, and was made into a feature film starring Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejiofor.  Ice Road was shortlisted for Britain’s prestigious Orange Prize.  She is a recipient of an Amnesty Media Award and co-compiler of the Tricycle production Guantanamo - Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, which she assembled, from spoken evidence, and her play, The Riots, was put on in 2011 in the Tricycle and Tottenham's Bernie Grant Arts Centre.  Gillian has been President of English PEN since 2010.  The General: The Ordinary Man Who Challenged Guantanamo, which she wrote with Ahmed Errachidi, was published in 2013.

Margie Orford, an award-winning journalist and internationally acclaimed writer, is the author of the Clare Hart series of crime novels set in South Africa and Namibia.  Her novels have been translated into nine languages.  She was born in London, grew up in Namibia, and lives in Cape Town.  A Fulbright Scholar, she was educated in South Africa and the United States.  She is Executive Vice-President of South African PEN, the patron of Rape Crisis and of the children’s book charity, the Little Hands Trust, and was one of the editors of the Feminist Press anthology Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region.  Water Music, the fifth novel in the Clare Hart series, will be published in July.  In her capacity as Executive Vice-President of South African PEN, she recently attended the PEN World Voices Festival in New York and the Writers in Prison Meeting in Krakow.

This event follows on from the 2012 'Prison Fictions and Human Rights' project organised by Claire Westall and Michelle Kelly.

A Modern School/Writers at York event.

Contact: Claire Westall or Michelle Kelly