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Monuments, Creativity and Wrecking: Lara Haworth and Han Smith in conversation

Thursday 27th February 2025
18:30 at Waterstones, London - Islington

Monuments, Creativity and Wrecking: Lara Haworth and Han Smith in conversation Monuments, Creativity and Wrecking: Lara Haworth and Han Smith in conversation

 
Lara Haworth, author of the Nero Book Awards-shortlisted Monumenta, and Han Smith, author of the Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking, come together to discuss their compelling debuts. Expect striking female protagonists, ghosts and intricate family dynamics.
Join chair Rali Chorbadzhiyska for an insightful conversation with the authors on writing about the past, reflecting on its formative nature and exploring how it shapes our ability to step into the future.

MONUMENTA

Olga Pavic’s house has been requisitioned.
The council will bulldoze it.
Her home will become a monument to a massacre.
But Olga cannot ascertain which massacre. Three different architects visit, each with a proposal to construct a different monument, to memorialise a different horror.
Within an atmosphere of razor-sharp political surreality, Lara Haworth spins a tender, magical story of familial love and loss. Via a panoply of
perspectives Monumenta compellingly and playfully explores remembrance and how tragedy can be the catalyst for remarkable transformation.

PORTRAITS AT THE PALACE OF CREATIVITY AND WRECKING

The almost daughter is almost normal because she knows how to know and not know.
She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows - almost - about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape.
Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all. Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is a story of seeing and part-seeing, of silence and speaking out, of conformation and confrontation, by an exhilarating new voice in fiction.

Lara Haworth is a writer, filmmaker and a political researcher, specialising in the UK’s move to become carbon zero by 2050. Having turned an extract from Monumenta into a short story, she won a Bridport prize for it in October 2022. In the same year she won a prize for her poem ‘The Thames Barrier’ in the Café Writers Poetry Competition, wrote and narrated a podcast, The Swimming Pool, for NTS radio and was commissioned to write a long autofiction feature, Mistakes are Pure Colour, for Extra Extra Magazine. Her writing workshop, Letters That Will Never Be Sent, was featured in a BBC World Service documentary. Her film, All the People I Hurt With My Wedding, won the LGBT prize at the Athens International Monthly Film Festival, and her latest film, Grief is a Hungry Ghost, has premiered at festivals including Japan International, New York Tri-State and Munich New Wave. Monumenta is her first novel.

Han Smith grew up in Japan, Russia and elsewhere. A queer writer, translator and adult literacy teacher, Han is the recipient of a 2019/2020 London Writers Award, was shortlisted for the 2019 Mslexia Novella Award, the Bridport Prize and the Desperate Literature short story prize, and was longlisted for the Brick Lane short story prize. She has also been published by Five Dials, Cipher Press, Hotel, Versopolis, LossLit, Litro, The Interpreter's House and the European Poetry Festival. She lives in London. Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is her debut novel.
 
London - Islington Waterstones, London - Islington
Thursday 27th February 2025
18:30
Book & Ticket (PB/Monumenta): £12 (PB/Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking): £16
General Admission: £5

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