The next event is the rescheduled evening with Sue Gee and Sir Roy Strong. Now being held at St Mary’s Church in Ross on Wye, we have additional tickets on sale. Sue interviewed a variety of writers about their craft including Sir Roy. What is a writer’s life like, how does the creative process work for each of them? Just you and the Page explores these themes.
“When I write, I want to smash through something.”
“Writing is something without which you die.”
“New technologies have fundamentally changed what it means to be a writer.”
Just You and the Page opens in 1971, with the dramatist Michael Wall hammering out his plays on a portable typewriter. It concludes in 2020, when the novelist and academic Josie Barnard is teaching students to compose novels on Instagram. Between them are Booker prize winners; a poet whose life was changed by a profound religious conversion; a translator for whom Pushkin has meant everything; a distinguished environmental journalist; a famous diarist; a nature writer who restored a wood, and a political activist who fled her country and is writing now in exile.
Sue Gee has interviewed twelve distinctively different writers, all old friends, looking at what has shaped them: at struggle, inspiration and dedication to their art. Part memoir, part literary biography, published in extraordinary times, Just You and the Page is above all about resilience.
“I loved this wonderful and admirable book. Sue Gee has written an important celebration of friendship, solitude, writing and reading. Each portrait of her twelve writer-friends is compelling and memorable. A book to savour.” – Peter J. Conradi
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