The Literary Salon

Kerry Hudson attended nine primary schools and five secondaries living in B&B's and council flats as she and her mum were forced to move again and again by poverty. Now Kerry is a rightly acclaimed novelist, activist and columnist and her life is unrecognisable. But how did she get from there to here and is her journey complete? What of the places she left? Listen to her incredible conversation with Damian Barr and her readings from Lowborn, a memoir like no other and essential for our times. Recorded at Damian Barr's Literary Salon at The Savoy, 18th October 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here at Salon we’re *so* excited about the debut novel from Okechukwu Nzelu and we're thrilled to feature him as a Salon Exclusive! Here he reads to us from 'The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney' - a very funny and bighearted story. In it we see Nnenna approaching womanhood, full of questions about how to ‘be’ when there’s so much she doesn’t know of her cultural and familial history, and we meet her mother Joanie, wondering how to love when she has never truly been loved. Their story is definitely one you’ll want to hear. 'The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney' is published by the pioneering and brilliant Dialogue Books and is available now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jojo Moyes - Literary Salon - July 2019 by Damian Barr's Literary Salon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dustin Lance Black – who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Milk and helped overturn California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 – talks with Damian Barr at special Outsider Memoirs Salon at the Theatre Royal in Brighton. Dustin grew up in a conservative Mormon household in Texas. Here he reads t us from his inspiring memoir Mama's Boy, and discusses his childhood, his plucky mother, and much much more. Packed with passion, politics and humour, this is an episode not to be missed! And don’t forget to check out our other podcast from the same night, with the brilliant Tracey Thorn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To read a memoir is to become part of somebody else’s story, to see yourself reflected in their pages. In a special Outsider Memoirs Salon at Brighton's Theatre Royal, Tracey Thorn joined us to share her latest memoir 'Another Planet'. We were taken to the scene of her 1970s childhood where ‘life was slow and very little happened, over and over again’ as her diary records. How did she get from there to Everything But The Girl? And don’t forget to check out our other podcast from the same night, with the brilliant Dustin Lance Black. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

EXCLUSIVE - feast your ears on a never-heard-before podcast special from the Salon archives! Pour yourself a glass of wine and join us at Cheltenham Literature Festival 2017 with the brilliant Rachel Joyce. In this Book and A Bottle Salon, we enjoyed a joyously delicious hour of reading, wine-tasting and talking with the best-selling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Rachel read from her fourth novel The Music Shop, following record-shop owner Frank who can always find the very song to cure customers of their emotional woes. And when you've enjoyed that, be sure to check out our friend Joe Haddow's brilliant literary podcast 'Book Off!' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Damian Barr gives an exclusive reading for Salonistas from his debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here. The book is a powerful and urgent novel of two connected South African stories, exploring how the past influences the present and what choices we have - or not - in influencing our destiny. This reading is the final of three released across March. The book is available to preorder now at smarturl.it/m1t2vm and is published in the UK on 4th April and the USA on 14th May 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Damian Barr gives an exclusive reading for Salonistas from his debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here. The book is a powerful and urgent novel of two connected South African stories, exploring how the past influences the present and what choices we have - or not - in influencing our destiny. This reading is the second of three being released across March. The book is available to preorder now at smarturl.it/m1t2vm and is published in the UK on 4th April and the USA on 14th May 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here at Salon we’ve long loved the risk-taking journalism of Saskia Vogel. So we’re delighted to feature her as a Salon Exclusive! Here she reads to us from her debut novel ‘Permission’ - a raw, fresh and very honest love story about dreams, expectations, and the erotic. And grief, yes grief too. When Echo’s father gets swept away by a freak current off the Los Angeles coast, she finds herself sinking into a complete state of paralysis. The book follows the failed young actress as she attempts to seek solace in the best way she knows: losing herself in the lives of strangers. ‘Permission’ is published by Dialogue Books and is out now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Damian Barr gives an exclusive reading for Salonistas from his debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here. The book is a powerful and urgent novel of two connected South African stories, exploring how the past influences the present and what choices we have - or not - in influencing our destiny. This reading is the first of three which will be released over the next few weeks. The book is available to preorder now at http://smarturl.it/m1t2vm and is published in the UK on 4th April and the USA on 14th May 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A special Oceania themed Literary Salon hosted by Damian Barr in the penthouse of New Zealand House to coincide with the major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. Joining Damian for this special Salon are five leading voices from the Pacific...Māori writers Witi Ihimaera, Tina Makereti and Paula Morris and Pasifika poets David Egglegon and Karlo Mila, all of whom tell stunning Oceanic stories for the 21st century. Damian Barr, award-winning writer, journalist, presenter and salonnière is now an honorary New Zealander by virtue of the fact that on his most recent visit to the country he made headlines and engaged in friendly Twitter exchange with NZ Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern*. *She expressed concern over his dislike of New Zealand cheese. More on the writers... Witi Ihimaera is one of New Zealand’s greatest modern writers; in 1974 he became the first Māori author to publish a novel, and four of his books including Whale Rider have been made into feature films. Tina Makereti’s latest novel The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke tells the story of young Māori man who becomes a ‘living exhibit’ at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, in 1846. Paula Morris is the author of eight novels. Her most recent book False River is a collection of stories and essays around the subject of secret histories. David Eggleton, poet, writer, reviewer and editor published a new poetry collection Edgeland in 2018. He has won a number of awards including, uniquely among NZ poets, the London Time Out Street Entertainer of the Year (1985). Pasifika poet, Karlo Mila, who represented Tonga at the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, has a new poetry collection coming in 2019. Supported by Creative New Zealand with thanks to the New Zealand High Commission and Black Estate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Damian in conversation with Maggie O'Farrell at the Edinburgh Book Festival. She reads from her astonishing memoir I am I am I am. It details her many and various brushes with death and her astonishing will to survive. A warning: someone fainted at the first reading. it's not gory but it is very intense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, here it is: the first ever reading from my first ever novel! Where else would I read it for the first time?! It's such a privilege to have all you Salonistas along with me on this journey. I am interviewed by Kirsty Wark - lucky me! The novel has already been previewed in the Guardian, Observer & Financial Times. Here is what the Big Issue had to say in their look ahead to 2019: 'Maggie and Me introduced the world to a startlingly clear and honest working class voice, but for his debut novel Damian Barr has chosen to travel thousands of miles from the North Lanarkshire setting of his lauded memoir. You Will be Safe Here tells the stories of two families separated by a century, but symbolically and viscerally connected. The oppression of a South African family rounded into a concentration camp by English soldiers during the second Boer War is echoed in the modern-day story of Johannesburg teenager Willem, who is ‘not turning out right’ and is sent to a brutal training camp to have his too-soft corners sharpened up. The landscape and vernacular couldn’t be more different from Barr’s own childhood homestead, but the themes he understands so well, and writes about so simply and evocatively, remain: the cruel, isolating experience of being bullied by a knuckle-headed majority; the sweet relief in finding a sympathetic friend among the angry, contemptuous throng. Without melodrama or sentiment, Barr is proving himself a master of show-don’t-tell writing which packs a hefty emotional punch. He seems to do it just by listening, thinking, then letting the words flow. Extraordinary. (Jane Graham)' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kirsty Wark has anchored Newsnight since 1993. She famously clashed with Margaret Thatcher and has interviewed every Prime Minister since - and probably also whoever it is that will be Prime Minister next month. She premiered her first novel, The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle, at the Salon almost exactly five years ago. Tonight, she returns to take us all to The House By The Loch –don’t let your American publishers change that to Lake. Wark’s second novel is set in Galloway- one the most beautiful and least well-known parts of Scotland, even to many Scots. This sparsely populated but spare and beautiful landscape anchors three generations of one family struggling with grief in the present and a secret from the past. As with her debut, The House by the Loch draws on historic events and, inevitably, her own personal history but Jean and Walter and their families aren’t real. It had me reading fast just to find out what happens next then slowing down just to admire the view. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

World premiere of Sweet Sorrow, David's new novel, at the Savoy on Feb 11, 2019. Back in 2009, when we were at Shoreditch House, David Nicholls took to the stage – okay we didn’t have a stage, we had a stool - and made us all fall in love with Dexter and Emma. One Day went on to do quite well. Five years after that he took us all round Europe and to the breaking heart of a couple falling out of love in the middle of their midlife crisis. Five years later – and fresh from the searing Emmy-nominated success of adapting the Patrick Melrose novels – he returns to the Salon to premiere his new novel. Sweet Sorrow is both sweet and sorrowful, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always enchanting. It is the story of one life-changing summer for sixteen-year-old Charlie Lewis. Charlie is the kind of boy you don’t remember in the school photograph: ‘my distinctive feature was a lack of distinction’. School is not good and home is even worse - he’s stuck with his depressed father. Suddenly Fran Fisher bursts into his life – gorgeous, clever and properly a bit posh. But if Charlie wants to be with Fran, he risks the censure of his buddies and steps out from the safety of average anonymity into the spotlight. Fran is in an am drama production of Romeo & Juliet. To find love Charlie must risk tragedy. The price of hope is Shakespeare. Hark, it’s the return of David Nicholls! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices