An Evening With Ian McEwan & Sarah Perry

St Andrews Hall | The Halls, St Andrews Plain, Norwich, NR3 1AU

Suitable for ages 15+

Ian McEwan, our foremost storyteller, returns to Norwich UNESCO City of Literature to discuss his ambitious and mesmerising new novel, Lessons.

Spanning a 70-year period, Lessons starts as the Second World War is ending, taking in the Suez and Cuban Missile Crises, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and continuing right up to the current pandemic and climate change. It raises important questions for us all. How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past?

McEwan’s novel is a chronicle of our times — a powerful meditation on history and humanity told through the prism of one man’s lifetime.

Ian will be in conversation with Sarah Perry, the internationally bestselling author of Melmoth, The Essex Serpent, and After Me Comes the Flood. Together they will discuss his new novel and his longstanding relationship with Norwich. Back in 1971, Ian was the first graduate of UEA’s MA in Creative Writing, and he also supported the city’s bid to become England’s first UNESCO City of Literature in 2012.

Pre-signed books will be available to purchase on the night from The Book Hive.

Celebrating ten years of Norwich UNESCO City of Literature, programmed by National Centre for Writing. In partnership with The Book Hive

Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Melmoth, The Essex Serpent, and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year Award and the British Book Awards, and has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award. Her essays have been widely published, and she has contributed to the Guardian, the New York Times, the Observer, and the London Review of Books. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has a PhD in Creative Writing, and has been a UNESCO City of Literature Writer in Residence in Prague, and a Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library and the Savoy Hotel in London. Her second novel, the No 1 bestseller The Essex Serpent, was adapted for television, starring Claire Danes in the lead role.

 please note: concessions are - Disabled, Full-time Carer, Full-time student, Go4Less card holder, Jobseeker and over 65s