Esther Freud and
Patrick Gale
in conversation
Novelists are notorious magpies, stealing from their own lives and families before disguising the evidence as fiction. But where does memory end and invention begin, and what happens when the people closest to a writer recognise themselves on the page?
Esther Freud’s My Sister and Other Lovers returns to the sisters first encountered in Hideous Kinky, drawing on an unconventional childhood to explore love, loyalty and the competing versions of a family’s past. In Love Lane, Patrick Gale revisits Harry Cane, the character inspired by his own great-grandfather, to tell a story of homecoming, buried sexuality and the long afterlife of family secrets.
Two of Britain’s finest novelists come together for a candid and revealing conversation about transforming lived experience into fiction, the liberties writers take with the truth, and whether every family contains the makings of a novel.
Friday 23 October, 7pm at the Poly
About Esther Freud
Author of My Sister and Other Lovers
Esther Freud is the author of ten novels. Her first, Hideous Kinky, was made into a film starring Kate Winslet. After publishing her second book she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists and her books have been translated into thirteen languages.
Her other titles include The Sea House, Mr Mac and Me, and I Couldn’t Love You More. Her first full length play, Stitchers, was produced in London in 2018, and she has a children’s book: Enchanted Book, out this year. Esther also writes regularly for newspapers and magazines and teaches creative writing in her own local group.
Her most recent novel, My Sister and Other Lovers, is published by Bloomsbury.
About Patrick Gale
Author of Love Lane
Patrick Gale is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. Born on the Isle of Wight in 1962, he studied English at New College, Oxford, before publishing his first two novels, The Aerodynamics of Pork and Ease, on the same day in 1986. His subsequent novels include Notes from an Exhibition, A Perfectly Good Man, A Place Called Winter, Take Nothing With You and Mother’s Boy.
Patrick also wrote the International Emmy Award-winning BBC drama Man in an Orange Shirt, inspired by his parents’ marriage and his father’s concealed sexuality. He moved to Cornwall in 1987 and now lives on a farm near Land’s End with his husband, the sculptor and farmer Aidan Hicks. A keen gardener and cellist, he was the founding artistic director of the North Cornwall Book Festival and remains a prominent supporter of literary and cultural life in Cornwall.
