The Silver Book: Olivia Laing in conversation with Charlie Lee-Potter

Goldsmiths Writers' Centre and the Oxford Centre for Life Writing present

The Silver Book: Olivia Laing in conversation with Charlie Lee-Potter

‘It is dangerous to want someone this much. He has always known it, from the very first night.’

It is September 1974. Two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realising the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young – and beautiful – apprentice is just what he needs.

He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism.

But Nicholas has a secret and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amidst the rising tensions of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn’t intend.

The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller, set in the dream factory of cinema. It’s a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.

Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They’re the author of eight books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time. Laing’s first novel, Crudo, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and in 2018 they were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. They’re an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and their books have been translated into twenty-one languages.

Charlie Lee-Potter is an award-winning writer, poet and artist. She’s a former BBC foreign correspondent and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s PM, The World at One and Open Book. Charlie is the recipient of the International Créateurs Prize for Creative Journalism and her podcast, Inside A Mountain, has been shortlisted for the International Women’s Podcast Awards. She holds two doctorates and is a lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford,. Her poetry collection A Line is a Breathless Length will be published this winter.

Cinema, Richard Hoggart building; followed by a drinks reception in the Cinema Cafe. This event is free and open to all to attend.