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In conversation about her acclaimed biography In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein, Fiona Sampson will discuss aspects of Shelley's life that has been obscured by the fame of her monster and his creator, her celebrity friends and famous parents. Retrieving her and highlighting her precocious childhood, her audacious writing life (Frankenstein was finished when she was only 19 years old), and how that inspired and impacted on her writing. Fiona Sampson writes that Mary has been obscured as if she has "fade(d) to white" like Frankenstein's creature who "goes out, alone again, onto the Arctic ice to die." The art of biographical writing and the research needed to undertake these projects will also be covered. 

Following this conversation, Fiona Sampson will introduce her brand-new biography, Becoming George: The invention of George Sand, and give a reading from the book. In Becoming George, Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. Too often underestimated in the century and a half since her death. She speaks to us today - about ecology, politics, society, gender - with brilliant prescience, a figure ahead of her time. 

Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British writer, Romantacist and poet. Professor Emerita of Poetry, University of Roehampton and Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College University of Oxford, she's received numerous national and international literary awards. Translated into over thirty languages, her most recent literary biography, Two-Way Mirror, was a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Plutarch Prize & US PEN's International biography prize. Her most recent poetry collection, Come Down won the Naim Frasheri laureateship, Wales Poetry Book of the Year and the European Lyric Atlas.

Free of charge. To avoid disappointment,