Thursday 17 January 2013

Writing about Lawrence Durrell

Peter Baldwin of the Delos Press, who was sitting in the audience at the Lawrence Durrell centenary conference in London in June 2012, has given me some photographs he took during the biographers' session.  Rather late in the day to be showing them now, but I show them anyway.

Joanna Hodgkin, Michael Haag and Ian MacNiven

The biographers' session heard talks from three people who have written about Durrell's life.  Ian MacNiven is the author of Lawrence Durrell: A Biography.  Joanna Hodgkin, who is the daughter of Nancy Durrell by her second marriage, has written Amateurs in Eden, an account of Nancy and Lawrence Durrell's time in Corfu.  Michael Haag has written Alexandria: City of Memory, which is a social and cultural history of the cosmopolitan city during the early twentieth century.  It also tells the story of three writers who lived there, Constantine Cavafy, E M Forster and Lawrence Durrell; Michael Haag is now working on a new biography of Durrell to be published by Yale University Press.

Michael Haag and Ian MacNiven