Public Lecture: ‘Writing Abortion: Reflections on “Larger than an Orange”‘

This event is hosted in collaboration with the Feminist Thinking Seminars, organised by students reading for the MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programme.

In her award-winning debut, Larger than an Orange (Chatto & Windus, 2021), Lucy Burns interweaves diary entries, poetic prose, and literary fragments to document her experience of undergoing an abortion. The book spans the days leading up to the procedure and the months following, capturing this life event’s physical, emotional, and psychological complexities while remaining resolutely pro-choice.

Four years after the publication of her experimental memoir, Larger than an Orange (Chatto & Windus, 2021), Lucy Burns revisits the ethical complexities of writing and publishing the book – and explores some of the unique challenges of writing about abortion.

Speaker Details:

Lucy Burns (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Prose at Liverpool John Moores University. Her first book, Larger than an Orange, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2021. It was named a 2021 Sunday Times Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award. Lucy is currently working on a creative non-fiction book about the US liberal arts college, Black Mountain College.

Josephine Rosman (she/her) is a graduate of Oberlin College. She is currently reading for an MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the portrayal of female friendship in modern and contemporary women’s literature and feminist theory.