Covering Afghanistan: Journalists Share Their Experiences

Heidi Kingstone, journalist, spent a year reporting from Afghanistan.

Heidi Kingstone, Afghanistan-based reporter for Canada’s National Post and The Huffington Post, discussed the challenges of presenting an accurate picture of Afghanistan. Moderator: Biographer Anne Sebba, former Reuters foreign correspondent and author of Battling for News, her book profiling women war correspondents.

Heidi Kingstone (writer for The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Spectator, The Independent, Vogue, The Guardian, Prospect, The Huffington Post, National Post), has reported on various topics from The Sudan, Bangladesh, DRC, Iraq, and Israel. She’s been based in Kabul for the past year and is the author of Dispatches from Kabul.

Anne Sebba, author of Battling for News: The Rise of the Woman Reporter, and most recently of Jennie Churchill: Winston’s American Mother. Anne Sebba is also the biographer of Laura Ashley and Enid Bagnold and is author of the forthcoming That Woman, a biography of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor.

Ruth Padel: Writing Nature in Poetry and Prose

Ruth Padel is the author of Darwin: A Life in Poems and Tigers in Red Weather.

Reading excerpts from her prose and poetry, including some unpublished verse, award-winning poet Padel discussed how she translates her passion for conservation and science into both forms of writing.

Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet, critic and novelist who has been acclaimed for her nature writing in multiple genres. She is currently Writer in Residence at the Environment Institute, University College, London. Her poetry collections include Darwin: A Life in Poems, a verse biography of Charles Darwin, her great-great grandfather.

Her non-fiction includes Tigers in Red Weather, an account of her journeys through Asian forests to learn about tiger conservation, and two books on reading contemporary poems, 52 Ways of Reading a Poem and The Poem and the Journey. Her first novel, Where the Serpent Lives, explores wildlife crime and human relations with the wild in India, London and Devon.

“Evocative depictions of life in the fast-degrading forests of India. She paints an apocalyptic picture of the ways in which the world’s wild animals are being endangered not only by the greed of criminals but also by the peasant’s desperate search for sustenance in economies interested only in development.”

— The Independent

Lyndall Gordon: Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds

Eminent literary biographer Gordon discussed her latest biography: Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds.

Lyndall Gordon is the biographer of Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft and T.S. Eliot. She is also the author of A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art and a memoir about childhood friends growing up in South Africa, Shared Lives. Her latest biography, Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, “blows apart the persistent myth of the meek, fragile spinster of odd rhymes,” writes Jenny McPhee on Bookslut.com, and exposes “a seething Peyton Place of adultery, betrayal and feuding” according to the Literary Review.

Maggie Gee: Memoir: Why Do it? And How Far Should You Go?

Novelist Maggie Gee, discussing her just-published memoir My Animal Life, with Salon co-organizer Sarah Glazer, answered questions about how far an author should go when writing about family and friends, the motherhood-work dilemma and surviving in the jungle of literary publishing.

Maggie Gee, the award-winning novelist, this year published a memoir entitled My Animal Life, her first non-fiction book. Her many novels include The Ice People, The White Family (shortlisted for the Orange prize), My Cleaner and My Driver.

She was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and her work has been translated into 13 languages. Critics have acclaimed My Animal Life for its uncompromising honesty and elegant prose. “A vivid portrait of a woman finding her way through the maze of class-ridden, post-war England, the 60s, feminism and how to be a mother and a writer,” says Diana Melly.

Sarah Glazer is a journalist whose articles on have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Congressional Quarterly. She writes a monthly blog, State of the Art, on publishing and writing for the website SheWrites.com.

Elaine Showalter & Miranda Seymour: Women Writers and Self-Promotion, A Historical Perspective

  • Miranda Seymour
  • Elaine Showalter

Literary critic Showalter and biographer Seymour discussed the challenges faced by women writers in getting recognition for their work both today and in the past—including anecdotes from their own careers.

Elaine Showalter, professor emerita at Princeton University, is a literary critic who has been a pioneer of feminist literary criticism. Her numerous books include the groundbreaking A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing; The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980; and most recently, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, a history of 250 American women writers, including the acclaimed and the less-well-known.

Miranda Seymour is a celebrated novelist and biographer. She is the author of the prize-winning memoir In My Father’s House. Her biographies include the Life of Mary Shelley, the Life of Henry James, Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend and biographies of Ottoline Morrell and Robert Graves. She has written four children’s books and five historical novels. Her most recent book is Chaplin’s Girl, about the movie star Virginia Cherrill, made famous by Charlie Chaplin.