Clare Morgan in conversation with Susan Sellers - Oxford Literary Festival

Novelists and teachers of creative writing Dr Clare Morgan and Professor Susan Sellers discuss how and why the radically experimental and pioneering writers Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield continue to inspire contemporary fiction.

Virginia Woolf described the short stories of Katherine Mansfield as ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of’. The feeling was mutual.  Their conversations left them dazzled, perplexed and fuelled with a desire to write more and better, say Morgan and Sellers. They discuss how this literary friendship and the writing it generated filtered through intervening decades to invigorate and influence their own new works, in fresh and quite unpredictable ways. And they look at what Woolf and Mansfield have to say to fiction now.  Morgan and Sellers also discuss the challenges, the solutions, and the excitements of their own writerly ’conversations’ with Woolf and Mansfield, in relation to their recently published works of fiction, Scar Tissue and Firebird: a Bloomsbury Love Story.

Morgan is director of Oxford University’s Master of Studies in Creative Writing and author of A Book for All and None. Sellers is professor of creative writing at St Andrew’s University and author of Vanessa and Virginia.

Book tickets on the festival’s website oxfordliteraryfestival.org.