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Ruth Padel will be joined by Lisa Appignanesi for a timely discussion about loss and memory, parents and children, the fragility of life, and the Holocaust on Crete. In reflections on art, music and archaeology, two RSL Fellow writers explore eras of instability and how culture helps us to understand them. 

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Lisa Appignanesi OBE FRSL is a prize-winning writer, novelist and cultural commentator. She has served as Chair of the Freud Museum London, President of English PEN, and Chair of the RSL, of which she is now a Vice-President. Her non-fiction includes Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness, All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion; Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present; Freud’s Women (with John Forrester); a biographical portrait of Simone de Beauvoir; and Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love. She is also the author of an acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead, and nine novels, including The Memory Man and Paris Requiem. Honorary Fellow, St Benet’s Hall Oxford. She was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2013.

Ruth Padel FRSL FZS is an award-winning British poet, author of twelve acclaimed poetry collections and a wildlife novel set in India. Her non-fiction includes books on ancient Greek religion and poetry, as well as the influence of Greek myth on rock music. She is Professor of Poetry at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her poems have appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The White Review, Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian. Awards include First Prize in the National Poetry Competition. Her lifelong links to Crete began as a student, when she worked on a dig for the British School of Archaeology at Knossos, and she has sung in Heraklion City Choir. Her first collection, Summer Snow, was named after a chasm in Cretan mountains and one of her tracks on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs was a Cretan folksong. Her latest novel, Daughters of the Labyrinth, was published by Hachette in July 2021.