David Lodge: Launching A Man Of Parts
Saturday 9th April 2011
David Lodge: Launching A Man Of Parts
£6.50 /£5 /7.30pm/ Recital Hall, Birmingham Conservatoire, Paradise Place, Birmingham B3 3HG
Sponsored by Harvill Secker.
David Lodge is a novelist, critic, and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught for many years, taking early retirement in 1987 to write full-time.
His new novel, A Man of Parts, is his fifteenth work of fiction. Others include Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1988), all of which are set partly in “Rummidge,” a mythical version of Birmingham, where he continues to live. He has won several prizes and awards, including the Hawtherndon Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize for Changing Places, the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award for Nice Work and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for How Far Can You Go? (1980). Both Small World and Nice Work were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. David Lodge adapted Nice Work and Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit as television serials for the BBC, produced at Pebble Mill in 1989 and 1994 respectively. More recent novels include Therapy (1995), Thinks…(2001), Author, Author (2004), and Deaf Sentence (2008) His stage plays The Writing Game (1990) and Home Truths (1998) were premiered at the Birmingham Rep, and a new play, Secret Thoughts, based on the novel Thinks… will be premiered at the Bolton Octagon in May of this year. He is the author of numerous works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel, and The Year of Henry James. In 1998 he was awarded the CBE for services to literature.
A Man of Parts, is about H.G.Wells. As the second war he has lived through moves into its final phase, the ailing “H.G.” loo
ks back on a life crowded with incident, books, and women. David Lodge achieves a riveting portrait of a remarkable man who embodied as many contradictions as he had talents: a socialist who enjoyed his affluence, an acclaimed novelist who turned against the literary novel, a feminist womaniser, sensual yet incurably romantic, irresistible and exasperating by turns to those who knew him personally, but always vitally human.
Join us in celebrating the publication of this latest work with David.
