Talks and Lectures

As well as taking part in many literary festival events and readings, I have been privileged to be asked to speak more formally on many occasions.

Most recently, I was very honoured to be asked to open Cambridge University Library’s new exhibition, Darwin in Conversation, celebrating the culmination of fifty years of the Darwin Correspondence Project. You can read the full text of my address here.

Many talks are on creative writing: I have given keynote speeches such as ‘Research, Free-search and the Dystopian Vision’ at the Playful Paradox conference in 2009, and in a this autumn I shall be giving to a still title-less speech at 2022’s Historical Novel Society Conference, as well as an address, ‘Experiments in the Past’ as part of the Open University New Historical Fiction seminar series. I have also given talks at Oxford University’s Creative Writing Summer School, as well as many other universities.

I have also frequently been asked to draw on my experience of creative work and creative thinking in my own Darwin-Wedgwood heritage, giving major talks from the UNAM in Mexico City and the University of Valencia to Pitlochry Winter Words Festival and Vaughan Williams’ birthplace, Leith Hill Place in Surrey. I have even unveiled two plaques commemorating Charles Darwin and his work, one in in Ramsgate in Kent (right) and the other in Elche in Spain.

If you would like to discuss my giving a talk or lecture, from a friendly, informal chat to a major event, click through to contact me.