The Glasgow School of Art

Lauren Elkin will discuss some of the great writing on cities by women: Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Martha Gellhorn, Sophie Calle, and make a case for the radical, subversive power of a woman on foot in the city. The afternoon workshop will explore how we are all influenced by the places we live in, write in and visit. Asking, how can we become more attuned to the way place shapes our lives? How do we write place, and what’s at stake when we do? Reading excerpts from An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, participants will have the chance to write about places both real and imaginary, of the art and the present, and, perhaps, the future.

Lauren Elkin is the author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (Chatto & Windus), and the co-author, with Scott Esposito, of The End of Oulipo? (Zer0 Books). She is also the co-translator of Claude Arnaud's Jean Cocteau: a Life (with Charlotte Mandell, Yale UP), recently long-listed for a PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and is currently translating Michelle Perrot's Histoire de chambres, also for Yale. Her essays and criticism have appeared in, among others, The Guardian, The New York Times, frieze, the FT, and The White Review, where she is a contributing editor. She is a lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, where she also co-directs the Centre for New and International Writing. Originally from New York, she lives between Liverpool and Paris.

This event has been organised in collaboration with the CCA Glasgow, as part of the Cities programme (1 July 2016 - 14 May 2017).