The Graham Storey Lecture by Professor Lydia Davis

As part of his estate, Graham Storey left a bequest to the English Faculty, University of Cambridge, to fund a lecture in his name.  The inaugural lecture was given in May 2008 by Professor James Wood of Harvard University and further lectures have been given by Professor Marina Warner in 2009, Anne Enright in 2010, Ian McEwan in 2011, Alan Hollinghurst in 2012 and Caryl Phillips in 2014.  This seventh lecture in the series will be given by Professor Lydia Davis and is entitled 'Bob, Son of Battle; Translating a Children's Classic from English to English'.

Date: Monday 2 May 2016
Time: 5pm
Location: Room GR06/07, Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Cost: Free admission

Topic: Professor Lydia Davis will be discussing the challenge of making a new, easier version of the very moving 1898 children’s classic Bob, Son of Battle (known in the UK as Owd Bob).  She will talk about the book’s author, Alfred Ollivant, and how the book came to be written, as well as children’s literature more generally, how children read, and the books that meant the most to her as a child.

Professor Lydia Davis is an American novelist renowned in literary circles for her extremely brief and highly inventive short stories.  She is the author of seven collections of stories, including Break it Down, Samuel Johnson is Indignant, and Can’t and Won’t, as well as one novel The End of the Story. Her Collected Stories were published as a single volume in 2009, and in 2013 she was awarded an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal for the Short Story, as well as the Man Booker International Prize.  She is also the translator of many books from the French, including Proust’s Swann’s Way and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. She is currently Professor and Writer in Residence at the University at Albany, New York.

Booking: Booking is not required

Additional information: The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Faculty of English