Man Booker at Birkbeck 2016, A Conversation with Colm Toibin

Professor Russell Celyn Jones in conversation with Colm Toibin about his novel The Testament of Mary (Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize)

Monday 17 October 2016, 5.30pm - 7.30pm at Friends’ House
(The event will begin promptly at 6pm so please arrive between 5.30pm and 5.45pm to be seated)

Registration is free, but places are limited, so booking is essential

Supported by Birkbeck, University of London and the Booker Prize Foundation

Each year, a Man Booker prize nominee comes to Birkbeck to deliver a talk and take part in a question and answer session. All students are invited to collect a free copy of the book (from the Birkbeck library from Monday 26th September) to read in advance of the event.

In a voice that is both tender and filled with rage, The Testament of Mary tells the story of a cataclysmic event which led to an overpowering grief. For Mary, her son has been lost to the world, and now, living in exile and in fear, she tries to piece together the memories of the events that led to her son's brutal death. To her he was a vulnerable figure, surrounded by men who could not be trusted, living in a time of turmoil and change. As her life and her suffering begin to acquire the resonance of myth, Mary struggles to break the silence surrounding what she knows to have happened. In her effort to tell the truth in all its gnarled complexity, she slowly emerges as a figure of immense moral stature as well as a woman from history rendered now as fully human.

Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six novels, including The Blackwater Lightship, The Master, both of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Brooklyn, which won the Costa Novel Award, and two collections of stories, Mothers and Sons and The Empty Family.

(NB This event is open to Birkbeck students, staff and alumni)