Symposium: le Carré’s People
Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature is proud to host the first ever symposium on John le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold fifty years after it was first published.
Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature is proud to host the first ever symposium on John le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold fifty years after it was first published.
The symposium, le Carré’s People, which takes place on 7 September, is a unique collaboration between Birkbeck, Penguin Books and the Barbican.
2013 marks 50 years since the publication of le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. This year Penguin Books celebrates the novel’s anniversary by publishing a new edition and we will be bringing together experts to look at the novel’s impact and relevance today.
This event also kicks off a short season of le Carré adaptations to be screened at the Barbican, beginning with a showing of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold directly after the symposium.
Director of the Centre for Contemporary Literature, Dr Joseph Brooker, says: ‘Penguin Books pointed out to me that it was the anniversary of this ground-breaking novel, and we have put together a day of talks that reflect on the novel itself but also on le Carré and spy fiction more generally. I’m glad that we are holding this event because le Carré’s fiction deserves the attention in itself; also because even his work from half a century ago raises issues that are still alive in the twenty-first century. At the Centre for Contemporary Literature, we don’t limit ourselves to a canon of “literary fiction”: we also have a strong interest in exploring genres of writing, as with the symposium a year ago on China Miéville and science fiction. This collaboration with Penguin and the Barbican also gives us the opportunity to consider the insights of spy fiction, a genre that has received comparatively scant attention in studies of contemporary writing’.