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31 TUESDAY
MARCH 2009
Adam Foulds interviewed
by Andrew Holgate
305
The Broken Word
6pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50
Adam Foulds is one of Britain’s most exciting young
writers. Winner of last year’s Sunday Times Young
Writer of the Year Award, he also received this
year’s Costa prize for poetry for this remarkable
narrative poem, the taut and brutal story of a young
man’s progress through the Mau Mau uprisings in
Kenya in the 1950s. With language and imagery that
feels utterly contemporary and a subject matter that
seems almost Homeric, the book shows civilisation
breaking down in a nightmare of rape and murder,
terror and tension. It is a remarkable achievement.
As well as discussing this work, Adam will also
read extracts from his forthcoming publication, The
Quickening Maze. Here he talks to Sunday Times
Literary Editor Andrew Holgate.
Iain Pears
Stone’s Fall
339
6pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50
In his most dazzling and brilliant novel since An Instance
of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears tells the story of John
Stone, financier and armaments manufacturer, a man
so wealthy that in the years before World War One
he was able to manipulate markets, industries and
indeed whole countries and continents.
A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart,
Stone’s Fall is a quest to discover how and why John
Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home.
Clive Aslet, Debbie Dance
and Justin Cartwright
The Oxford Times’ First Annual
Debate on the Future of Oxford
as a World-class City
316
6pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50
Oxford’s landscape, architecture and buildings,
its academic heritage, status as an international
publishing centre, and the enduring influence of its
artists, writers and thinkers have all contributed
to it being a ‘World-class’ City. But does it meet
the expectations of well-travelled visitors when
they arrive at the railway station or when they see
burger vans in front of great historic buildings Do
all communities engage with Oxford and see it as
their own community What makes a ‘World-class’
City, and will Oxford deserve such an accolade in the
future Clive Aslet, Editor of Country Life and author
of The English House, Debbie Dance, Director of the
Oxford Preservation Trust, and Justin Cartwright,
Booker shortlisted writer and author of The Secret
Garden: Oxford Revisited, discuss whether the myth
outstrips the reality.
Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton
Sponsored by The Macdonald Randolph Hotel
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