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Tara Westover, author of Educated in conversation with Professor David Runciman

Timings:

6.00pm – Doors Open

6.30pm – Introduction by Gates Cambridge Provost, Professor Barry Everitt

6.35pm – Professor David Runciman interviews Educated author, Tara Westover

7.15pm – Q&A with the audience

7.30pm – Drinks reception and bookstall provided by Heffers bookshop where Tara will be signing copies of Educated)

830pm – Ends

About the book:

Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho with a radical, survivalist father who was opposed to government interference in the lives of his family. As a result, there were no state or federal records of her existence and she didn’t get a birth certificate until she was nine. Nor had she set foot in a classroom before the age of 17. And yet, by 27 she had earned a doctorate from Cambridge University.

Educated tells the story of Westover’s self-invention and her determination to access knowledge. Given only a sparse and erratic education at home, she would eventually secure scholarships to study at Harvard and Cambridge.

Educated is unusual as a memoir, not least because Westover’s extraordinarily accomplished prose is self-taught, through repeated listenings to the New Yorker Fiction Podcast and a series of online tutorials on sentence structure. Westover is also young for a memoirist – she began writing the book at 28 and finished at
29 – which means that many of the events she relates are as yet unresolved. Westover says this was intentional. She wanted to write "in the chaos of events still unfolding, not in the calm of resolution".
From her unique experience, Westover tells a universal story about the transformative power of an education, but also of the very personal price she had to pay for that privilege. She explores the tension between loyalty to one’s family and loyalty to one’s self, as she struggles to find her place in a radical family. That struggle is ongoing. As she writes, Westover is still wondering whether she will ever be able to return home.
Educated is an inspiring story about the difficulty of defining yourself in opposition to everything you know. It will leave readers with a richer understanding of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it.

About the author:
Tara Westover was born in rural Idaho. She studied history at Brigham Young University and upon graduation was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, and later Harvard where she pursued an MPhil in intellectual history and political thought. She received her PhD in the same subject from Cambridge in 2014. She believes in education not as a means to making a living, but a way of making a person.

To request an interview with Tara Westover please contact Caitlin Allen at Riot Communications 020 3174 0118 / 07814403000 / caitlin@riotcommunications.com

For events with Tara please contact Najma Finlay, Hutchinson Publicity Director, 020 7840 8614 / nfinlay@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk