‘Anita Brookner and Zadie Smith: Art and Life’ Professor Dame Hermione Lee and Professor Peter Boxall in Conversation

Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop

Date: Friday, 30 October

Time: 11:30 to 13:30

Location: Seminar Room 10.424, English Faculty, Schwarzman Centre

Can we ever separate a writer’s life from their work?

To celebrate the publication of Professor Dame Hermione Lee’s Anita Brookner: Art and Life, and in anticipation of Professor Peter Boxall’s forthcoming book, Zadie Smith: Life in Fiction, Hermione and Peter will discuss the shifting relations between art and life.

Both Zadie Smith and Anita Brookner have expressed frustration with biographical readings. Smith has written that ‘fiction writers obsessively preserve their personal space, even while seeming to give it away’. And yet, for both Brookner and Smith, the delicate interlacing of art and life is central to the way their fiction works.

The conversation will explore this apparent contradiction, asking what happens when we read fiction in relation to its author’s life, and what we might gain—or lose—by doing so. More broadly, Hermione and Peter will consider what Brookner and Smith’s work reveals about the relationship between art and life, and about the possibilities and limits of biography now.

This workshop will appeal to readers and writers of life-writing, biography and fiction, and to anyone interested in the relationship between literary works and the lives of their makers. It will be of particular interest to researchers and students working on biography, literary criticism and the relationship between life-writing and fiction.

Speaker Details:

Professor Peter Boxall is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Twenty-First-Century Fiction (2013), The Value of the Novel (2015), and The Prosthetic Imagination (2020), and his edited collections include 1001 Books (2006), and the Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980-2018 (2019). He has been editor of Textual Practice since 2009. His volume of collected essays The Possibility of Literature came out in 2024, and his Cambridge Element on Beckett and Leopardi (with Peter Nicholls) appeared in 2025. He is currently at work on book on Zadie Smith, entitled Life in Fiction (CUP 2027), and a longer book entitled Fictions of the West.

Professor Dame Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a literary biographer, and her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography), Tom Stoppard (2020), and Anita Brookner (2026). She has also written and edited books on life-writing, including A Very Short Introduction to Biography, a collection of essays, Body Parts, and (with Dr Kate Kennedy) Lives of Houses. In 2023, she was made a GBE for services to English Literature. She founded OCLW in 2011.

About the Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops:

The Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops were established in 2022 by OCLW’s Professor Dame Hermione Lee, Professor Elleke Boehmer, and Dr Kate Kennedy in collaboration with the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. The workshops celebrate the life and intellectual legacy of Professor Laura Marcus (1956–2021): one of the most influential literary scholars of her generation and a much-loved colleague, teacher, and friend.

Held twice each term, the workshops provide a rare and valuable space for sustained intellectual exchange between students, academics, and writers. They foster conversations around creative practice and academic research, bringing together established and emerging voices. Their purpose is not simply to present completed research, but to create a collaborative intellectual space in which ideas can be developed, tested, challenged, and refined.

As part of The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing’s fifteenth anniversary fundraising campaign, we are seeking to establish The Laura Marcus Fund to secure the future of the Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshops.

By donating to the Laura Marcus Fund, you will help ensure that Laura's vision of scholarship—rigorous, generous, imaginative, and collaborative—continues to inspire future generations.

Find out more and donate here.

Further Details and Contacts:

This is an in-person event and will not be recorded.

This workshop is exclusively open to current members of the University of Oxford. Workshop places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to members of the English Faculty. 

Registration is required and willclose at 17:00 on Tuesday, 27 October 2026.Confirmation of successful registration will be sent soon after.

If you are able, please consider donating £5, £10, £20, or more to support OCLW’s free events, outreach activities, and programmes.

Donations can be made when booking your place or via our online donations portal. Every gift makes a difference. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to Dr Julia Dallaway.

How to book

1. Add your ticket
   Click Add to cart to add your free event ticket to your basket.

2. Complete the registration form
   After clicking Add to cart, you will be asked to complete a short registration form.

3. Add a donation
   To support OCLW, select a donation amount and click Add

4. Check out
   Click the cart icon in the top-right corner of the webpage. Review your order, then follow the instructions to complete your booking.

   Please note: Adding a ticket to your cart does not complete your booking. You must click the cart icon and complete the checkout process. Places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to members of the English Faculty. Confirmation of successful registration will be sent after registration closes.