Public lecture: Jeffrey Meyers on Writing Orwell's Biography

Event Details

Date:

Monday, 10 September 2012

Time:

11:30 am - 12:30 pm

UQ Location:

James and Mary Emelia Mayne Centre (St Lucia)

URL:

http://www.bwf.org.au

Event category(s):

Full Description:: The School of English, Media Studies, and Art History, in conjunction with the Brisbane Writers Festival present - Jeffrey Meyers on Writing Orwell's Biography.

George Orwell’s life and works have been thoroughly researched, but Jeffrey Meyers, who’d been teaching and thinking about Orwell, disagreed with the earlier biographies. He took up the challenge to write a better book. He began by asking many questions: what can Orwell’s work tell us? What was he like? How did he look? How did he laugh? What did he eat? Why did he go to Burma and not Cambridge? Why did he leave Burma? What sort of Socialist was he? In this session Meyers discusses how answering these and other questions became a biography.

Jeffrey Meyers, from Berkeley, has written more than 50 books and is a prolific essayist, critic and reviewer and a renowned biographer. His biographies include, from the film world, John Huston, Errol Flynn and son Sean, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, Humphry Bogart, Gary Cooper, etc., and from the world of literature, Orwell, Maugham, Frost, Wyndham Lewis, Lawrence, Samuel Johnson (his latest and recently published), Scott Fitzgerald, Conrad, and many more.