The Books that Made Me

Boyd Tonkin chairs literary panel at The British Library, in association with Wasafiri magazine and Arts Council England.

Monday 18 May: 6.30-8.00pm

Conference Centre, British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, W1

£6 / £4 concessions

2009 marks the 25th anniversary of Wasafiri magazine, the literary magazine at the forefront of contemporary international writing. To celebrate, the magazine is hosting a literary debate at The British Library, to discuss how literature impacts on some of the leading writers of today.

The panel, chaired by The Independent’s Literary Editor Boyd Tonkin, includes distinguished authors Helen Cross, Diana Evans, Aamer Hussein, Caryl Phillips and Marina Warner. Reflecting on the books that have inspired them, the panel will discuss why some books impact so forcefully on our reading and writing lives, as well as looking at the ways in which we encounter them and in which they return to us.

Wasafiri magazine was founded in 1984 by the writer, critic and academic, Susheila Nasta. Celebrating Britain’s diverse cultural heritage together with inspirational writing from around the world, the magazine champions new writing and has provided a platform for hundreds of writers. The magazine championed early works by Vikram Seth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and has featured interviews, reviews and new writing by Hari Kunzru, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Anita Desai, Linda Grant, Maggie Gee, Michael Horowitz and Catherine O'Flynn. Prestigious contributors to the magazine include V S Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri and Chinua Achebe.

Tickets for ‘The Books that Made Me’ are now on sale at http://boxoffice.bl.uk, by telephone on 01937 546546 (Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm) or in person at The British Library Information Desk.

For more information on this event and for a full list of anniversary activity throughout 2009, go to www.wasafiri.org.

Wasafiri is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the Open University and Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Profiles of chair and speakers:

• The Chair, Boyd Tonkin, studied English and French literature at Cambridge University. He taught literature in higher and adult education before becoming an award-winning magazine journalist, a feature writer and features editor of the weekly magazine for social services professionals, Community Care. Already a freelance writer and interviewer for The Observer, he became social policy editor of the New Statesman, and then Literary Editor, before moving to The Independent as Literary Editor. In addition to working as organiser and judge on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize since 2000, he has judged the Booker Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and (in 2007) the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature. He has reported on literary and artistic issues from more than 20 countries on four continents, and his cultural essays have been published widely; most recently, in the British Council anthology New Writing 15 (Granta).
• Helen Cross is the author of The Secrets She Keeps and My Summer of Love, which won a Betty Trask Prize and was made into an award-winning film. Helen's second novel, The Secrets She Keeps is now available in paperback, and her third novel, Spilt Milk, Black Coffee is published by Bloomsbury in May 2009. She lives in Birmingham.
• Diana Evans was a dancer before she became a writer and critic. Her first novel, 26a, received a Betty Trask award, a nomination for the Guardian First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award. It was also the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. She lives in London.
• Aamer Hussein is the author of the short story collections, This Other Salt, Turquoise and Insomnia. His first novel, Another Gulmohar Tree, will be published by Telegram on 7 May 2009.
• Caryl Phillips has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema and is the author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction. Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and Caryl Phillips has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Best of Young British Writers 1993. A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2004 and Dancing in the Dark was shortlisted in 2006. His next book, In the Falling Snow, will be published in June 2009.
• Marina Warner has an international reputation as a critic, historian and a novelist. Her recent non-fiction works include The Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman and Fantastic Metamorphoses, while her fiction includes the novels The Lost Father (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Indigo and The Leto Bundle, and most recently a short-story collection, Murderers I Have Known.