TCR Presents: Reader as Witness - Panel Discussion

Join authors, Sally Bayley, Alice Jolly and Miranda Gold for an illuminating evening of readings and discussion to explore how fiction and memoir invite us to bear witness. Questioning the false binary that literature serves to either confront or console, they will open up the ways in which consolation might reside in the confrontation.

Miranda Gold ​is a writer. Hailed as a ‘Great Jewish Book’ by Jewish Book Week, A Small Dark Quiet​ is a story of loss, migration and the search for belonging. Her second novel, the TLS called it “a bold attempt to portray the greyness of growing up without roots or identity”. Miranda is a creative writing tutor at Skylight, Crisis. She is currently collaborating with New River Press on an anthology of work by poets who have experienced homelessness.

Sally Bayley is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University and a College Lecturer in English at Hertford College and for Wadham College, Oxford University. Sally is now completing a series of three books. The first, Girl with Dove: a Life Built by Books (William Collins, 2018) was Radio 4’s Book of the Week in January 2019, and a Spectator Book of the Year (2018). The second part, No Boys Play Here, will be published April 2020.

Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. She has won the Pen Ackerley Prize for memoir and the V.S.Pritchett Prize, awarded by the Royal Society of Literature. She teaches on the Masters Degree in creative writing at Oxford University. Her fourth novel Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, a Walter Scott Prize recommended novel for 2109, was on the longlist for the Ondaatje Prize 2019 and runner-up for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019.

Suzi Feay is a member of the Authors Club and chair of the Critics Circle books section. She reviews fiction for the Guardian, Spectator and Financial Times. She will be chairing the event.