Wednesday 26 February 2020

6-8pm

The Hall, The Artworkers Guild, 6 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AT

To kick start our series of Selvedge Socials in 2020, Tracy Chevalier and Nicola Beauman will be leading the discussion on text and textiles. Both prominent female writers they have both explored how textiles are interwoven into women's lives.

Tracy Chevalier FRSL is the author of ten novels. She is best known for the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has been translated into 43 languages, sold over 5 million copies worldwide, been made into a film, and will soon be performed as an opera. Her most recent novel is A Single Thread, about the embroidered cushions and kneelers made during the 1930s for Winchester Cathedral. She grew up in Washington DC and in 1984 moved to London, where she lives with her husband and son.

Nicola Beauman née Mann was born in 1944 and brought up in London. After reading English at Cambridge she married Nicholas Lacey, the architect, worked in New York as a journalist and in an art gallery, and in London in publishing and as a fiction reviewer; her five children were born between 1968 and 1985. In 1976 she married the economist Christopher Beauman. A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39, her first book, was published by Virago in 1983 (reprinted 1989 and 1995); it was reissued in 2008, twenty-five years after first publication, as a Persephone book. Cynthia Asquith appeared in 1987, Morgan: a biography of EM Forster in 1993, and The Other Elizabeth Taylor was published in April 2009 as A Persephone Life. Nicola Beauman founded Persephone Books in 1998. It was set up to reprint (mostly) women writers, (mostly) of the inter-war period portrayed in A Very Great Profession, and now has over a hundred titles in print.

Clare Hunter has been a banner maker, community textile artist and textile curator for over twenty years and established the community sewing enterprise NeedleWorks in Glasgow in the 1980s. Threads of Life is her first book and has been warmly received, reaching The Sunday Times Bestseller List and being broadcast as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. In 2017 she was a recipient of a Creative Scotland Award to assist with the research for Threads of Life. She lives in Scotland.

For further information please contact Catherine Harris (events@selvedge.org)