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Free Speech and the Politics of Literature

We're collaborating with the Language, Literature and Politics (LLP) research group
at the Open University to deliver a series on online and in-person events that explore different aspects
of the complex relationship between writing, literature and free speech.

 

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Free Speech and Literature: Literature and Offence

Literature and Offence: Mark Rosenblatt with Monika Smialkowska

Monday 10 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan

Is theatre still the ideal venue for exploring challenging, complex and even potentially offensive topics? Dr Monika Smialkowska discusses these issues with Mark Rosenblatt, author of the new play Giant, a fictionalised account of the circumstances leading up to an interview that Roald Dahl gave in which he expressed a series of explicitly antisemitic opinions. 

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The Age of the Algorithm: Julia Bell with Philip Seargeant

Monday 17 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan

Writer and creative writing lecturer Julia Bell talks to the OU’s Philip Seargeant about how the implementation of AI impacts writers’ freedom of expression, covering topics from augmented writing applications’ influence on style and content to ways that techno-capitalism exploits and monetises human behaviour.

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Historical Cancel Culture: Charlotte Gordon with Jupiter Jones

Monday 24 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan

Charlotte Gordon, author of Radical Outlaws, talks to Jupiter Jones about the eighteenth-century writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and how, after her untimely death, Wollstonecraft was effectively ‘cancelled’, due largely to the publication of a scandalous tell-all memoir.

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Translation and Censorship: Sawad Hussain & Monica Cure with Daria Chernysheva

Monday 31 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan

In this event, we explore literature in translation with a specific focus on censorship and free speech through the lens of two novels that both address these concerns: Liliana Corobca’s The Censor’s Notebook and Bothayna al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library.

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