21/04/2022

Authors’ Club Lunch with John Walsh- BOOKING NOW CLOSED

12:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Something extraordinary happened to the UK literary scene in the 1980s. In the space of eight years, a generation of young British writers took the literary novel into new realms. It began with two names – Martin Amis and Ian McEwan – and became a flood: Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson and Pat Barker among them. Suddenly, authors of serious fiction were like rock stars.

Through this exciting, hectic period, the journalist and author John Walsh played many parts: literary editor, reviewer, interviewer, prize judge and TV pundit. He met and interviewed numerous literary stars, attended the best launch parties and digested all the gossip and scandal of the time. In Circus of Dreams: Adventures in the 1980s Literary World he reports on what he found, first with wide-eyed delight and then with a keen eye on what drove this glorious era. The result is a unique hybrid of personal memoir, oral history, literary investigation and elegy for a golden age.

John Walsh began his journalistic career selling advertising space in The Tablet to nuns. Since then he’s been literary editor of three newspapers, a contributor to scores of magazines from the New Yorker to Mojo, and spent 20 years as a columnist, feature writer, food critic and interviewer on the Independent. He’s the author of a memoir, The Falling Angels, and the novel Sunday at the Cross Bones. He was director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature in the late 1990s, and for 17 years could be heard on the Radio 4 literary quiz show, The Write Stuff.