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Writing Closed Worlds



In her memoir, Cloistered, Catherine Coldstream tells the story of her twelve years in a traditional silent monastery in the 1990s. In this talk she will be discussing her experience of writing about life in a closed world, and how she met the challenge of conveying an essentially ‘hidden’ life in narrative form.



Catherine Coldstream was born in London, and has studied at the Universities of Oxford, East Anglia, and Goldsmiths, London. After converting to Roman Catholicism, in her twenties, she entered the Carmelite order as an enclosed nun. Since leaving monastic life she has taught philosophy and ethics in schools and completed a doctorate in Creative Writing (Memoir) at Goldsmiths.



The Many Lives of Mary Lamb



This talk will explore absences and illness in the writing of Mary Lamb (1764-1847). Her life-writing is fragmentary, glimpsed in her stories for children, letters, one polemic essay; writing about her life is often constrained by difficulty in describing her mental illness and her matricide. We will focus on her evasive, intriguing tales for children and how to read their hidden stories of grief, loss, belief and consolation.



Felicity James teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, and creative writing, at the University of Leicester, in the School of Arts and the Centre for Empathic Healthcare. She is editing the children’s writing of Charles and Mary Lamb for the Oxford Collected Works; more broadly, she researches religious dissent, specifically Unitarianism, and its rich literary culture.

Sir Stephen Hough joins Dr Kate Kennedy in conversation about life-writing, music, and Stephen's recent autobiography, Enough (2023).



Sir Stephen Hough is one of the most distinctive artists of his generation. He combines a distinguished career as a pianist with those of composer and writer.



Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Hough was the first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (2001). He was awarded Northwestern University’s 2008 Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano, won the Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist Award in 2010, and in 2016 was made an Honorary Member of RPS. In 2014 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2022.



Since taking first prize at the 1983 Naumburg Competition in New York, Sir Stephen has appeared with most of the major European, Asian and American orchestras and plays recitals regularly in major halls and concert series around the world from London's Royal Festival Hall to New York’s Carnegie Hall. He has been a regular guest at festivals such as Aldeburgh, Aspen, Blossom, Edinburgh, La Roque d'Anthéron, Hollywood Bowl, Mostly Mozart, Salzburg, Tanglewood, Verbier, and the BBC Proms, where he has made 29 concerto appearances, including playing all of the works of Tchaikovsky for piano and orchestra, a series he later repeated with the Chicago Symphony.



Many of his catalogue of over 60 albums have garnered international prizes including the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, Diapason d’Or, Monde de la Musique, several Grammy nominations, eight Gramophone Magazine Awards including ‘Record of the Year’ in 1996 and 2003, and the Gramophone ‘Gold Disc’ Award in 2008, which named his complete Saint-Saens Piano Concertos as the best recording of the past 30 years. His 2012 recording of the complete Chopin Waltzes received the Diapason d’Or de l’Annee, France’s most prestigious recording award. His 2005 live recording of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos was the fastest selling recording in Hyperion’s history, while his 1987 recording of the Hummel concertos remains Chandos’ best-selling disc to date.



Published by Josef Weinberger, Sir Stephen has composed works for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, organ, harpsichord and solo piano. He has been commissioned by the Takacs Quartet, the Cliburn, CMS Lincoln Center, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, the Gilmore Foundation, The Genesis Foundation, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, London’s National Gallery, Wigmore Hall, Le Musée de Louvre and Musica Viva Australia among others.



A noted writer, Sir Stephen has contributed articles for The New York Times, the Guardian, The Times, Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine, and he wrote a blog for The Telegraph for seven years which became one of the most popular and influential forums for cultural discussion and for which he wrote over six hundred articles. He has published four books: The Bible as Prayer (Bloomsbury and Paulist Press, 2007); a novel: The Final Retreat (Sylph Editions, 2018); a book of essays: Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More (Faber & Faber and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019); and a memoir: Enough: Scenes from Childhood (Faber & Faber, 2023).



Sir Stephen is an Honorary Fellow of Cambridge University’s Girton College and holds the International Chair of Piano Studies at his alma mater, the Royal Northern College in Manchester. He is also a member of the faculty at The Juilliard School.



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Part of the Vera Fine-Grodzinski Programme for Writing Jewish Women's Lives



Thinking about both the women who survived and who did not survive the Holocaust demonstrates that especially under extreme conditions gender continues to operate as an important arbiter of experience. Whilst men and women were both sentenced to the same fate, gender nevertheless operated as a crucial signifier for survival.



Zoë Waxman, is Professor of Holocaust History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Writing the Holocaust: memory, testimony, representation (2006), Anne Frank (2015), and Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (2017), as well as numerous articles relating to the Holocaust and genocide.



Please find event accessibility details here: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/accessibility-wolfson-college

Part of the Vera Fine-Grodzinski Programme for Writing Jewish Women’s Lives



In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf created an imaginary sister for Shakespeare to ask what life would have been like for an equally talented woman. When considering the Yiddish literary landscape, there's no need to invent a fictional female - nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer's sister Esther Kreitman was also a novelist and short story writer; the probable role model for his depiction of Yentl, a woman desperate to learn. A recently discovered cache of letters from Esther to Bashevis has been translated by David Stromberg, the editor of the IBS estate, and published by Jewish Renaissance as a world exclusive, revealing how her gender, mental health and family relationships impacted her publication opportunities.





Dr Aviva Dautch is the Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance, the UK's Jewish arts and culture quarterly. She lectures on modern Jewish literature at the London School of Jewish Studies and JW3 and contributes to programmes on BBC Radio 4. She is also an award-winning poet whose residencies and commissions have included The British Museum, The National Gallery and Bradford and Hay Literature Festivals.



You can find event accessibility details here: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/accessibility-wolfson-college

Tamarin Norwood will discuss the process of writing The Song of the Whole Wide World, her new memoir interpreting the brief life of her baby son, written partly during pregnancy and partly during the silent maternity leave that followed. She will consider the ethical and poetic considerations of expanding fragmentary details into a meaningful life narrative, and explore parallels between the roles of poetry, myth, science and fiction in the creation of meaning. The question of how to address gaps in biographical evidence is critical to life-writing, but especially urgent when the subject of a biography has no voice at all. Her memoir—selected as an Editor's Choice in the Bookseller and as a favourite non-fiction slim volume by Pandora Sykes, with features in the Sunday Times Style and The Guardian—was completed while Tamarin convened the OCLW weekly writing sessions through lockdown, and she will close with some practical remarks on finding a writing community.



Dr Tamarin Norwood is a writer and academic with a background in fine art. She has written on drawing, metaphor, memorial and grief, and has an interest in ritual and rural history. Her academic research addresses the ad hoc beliefs that emerge in response to bereavement, with a focus on reproductive loss. Tamarin is a visiting fellow at the University of Bath Centre for Death and Society, a Leverhulme ECR fellow at Loughborough University, and a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford Centre for Life-Writing.



Accessibility details can be found here: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/accessibility-wolfson-college

Sally Bayley is an acclaimed author whose books explore the relationship between autobiography, biography, memoir, literary fiction. She's the author of the auto/biographical trilogy which includes the volumes Girl with Dove (2018), No Boys Play Here (2021) and The Green Lady (2023): this tripartite coming-of-age narrative challenges traditional demarcations between literary categories to cast its own, unconventional form. Situated along the shifting relationship between fiction and non-fiction, the first two volumes are based on a story that builds momentum from a child's imaginative relationship between literary characters and artistic forms as she searches for ways of seeing around difficulties. The third volume pushes this experimentation even further, connecting personal and cultural memory, archival sources and ‘imaginary biographies’, in a composite narrative that shifts across epochs and is framed by imaginative and real contexts.



The discussion will focus on the third volume of the trilogy, highlighting how, in Bayley’s works, lived experiences become material for her creative processes, producing a hybrid narrative that simultaneously reads as an autobiographical, biographical and/ or fictional work. Furthermore, focusing on the concept of relationality that sees auto/biographical narrative not as a solitary but as a relational story, the discussion will underscore the relationship between the individual life and wider webs of familial, social and historical structures, testified by a shifting narrative voice that alternates between subjective and collective consciousness.



Sally Bayley is a prize-winning author. She is a fiction and non-fiction writer who lives on a narrowboat on the River Thames in Oxford. Sally was the first child to go to University from West Sussex County Council care services and she is a Lecturer in English at Hertford College. She also teaches academic writing, literature, film and creative writing for the Sarah Lawrence Visiting Programme at Wadham College. From 2018-2020 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and in 2021 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.



Eleonora Maio is pursuing her doctoral studies in the Humanities Department at the University of Palermo, Italy. She currently is a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford, working on her dissertation about Sally Bayley’s experimental auto/biographical trilogy.



For accessibility details please see: https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/accessibility-wolfson-college