Join us for an evening of readings to celebrate a vibrant period of British avant-garde fiction which brought us, among others, the much-overlooked Ann Quin, cult author B.S. Johnson and counter-cultural writer Alexander Trocchi.

The trailblazing work of literary experimentalists in the 1960s was diverse in its aesthetics and, sometimes, divided in its politics, as it consumed myriad influences from Europe and the US. They spoke to the continuing fallout of the second World War and the decline of the British Empire, and set their face against dominant social realist trends of the time.

This event marks And Other Stories’ reissue of Berg, Ann Quin’s critically acclaimed 1964 debut which was later adapted into the 1989 film Killing Dad starring Richard E Grant and Denholm Elliott. Lee Rourke in The Guardian lauded Quin as “one of our greatest ever novelists… a new British working-class voice that had not been heard before.”

We will also be celebrating the release of British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (Edinburgh University Press) by Kaye Mitchell and Nonia Williams, which features detailed readings of authors such as Quin, Johnson, Trocchi, Maureen Duffy, Alan Burns, Christine Brooke-Rose and many others.

Featured readers include author and critic Joanna Walsh (The Guardian, The New Statesman, London Review of Books), co-director of the Centre for New Writing Kaye Mitchell, and Jennifer Hodgson, editor of Ann Quin’s The Unmapped Country and reviewer for Radio 4’s Open Book and BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. This event is presented in co-promotion with the Centre For New Writing and Dostoyevsky Wannabe.

Book your tickets here.