Works of Care: Amina Cain and Lisa Robertson in conversation

All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the event, available to watch back for 1 month.

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Join critically acclaimed authors Amina Memory Cain and Lisa Robertson for an evening of online readings and discussion on the theme of keeping house as explored in their novels narrated by cleaners who steal time at work and through the night to research, ultimately to write. The event will be chaired by Gemma Blackshaw, Professor of Art History at the RCA and guest-curator of the exhibition of artist Cathie Pilkington’s work, Housekeeper.

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Speakers:

Amina Memory Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy which introduces us to a cleaning woman at an art museum who nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. Described as a distillation of ‘a woman’s past into modern reality’, Indelicacy was published in 2020 by Daunt Books in the UK and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US. It was a finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. Cain has also published two collections of short fiction, Creature (2013) and I Go To Some Hollow (2009), and a book on writing, reading, and living, A Horse at Night (2022). Her writing has appeared in the LA Times, Granta, BOMB, The Paris Review Daily, Tate, etc. and other places. She lives in Los Angeles.

Lisa Robertson is a Vancouver writer who lives in France. Since her first book, XEclogue, in 1993, her work, often site specific in impetus, has ranged across forms—poem, essay, translation and novel—to explore the relationships of genre to aesthetic experience and subject formation. 2001’s The Weather, written at Cambridge, tests the poetic limits of Romantic meteorological discourse. 2020’s bildungsroman The Baudelaire Fractal, takes place in the cheap hotels and maids rooms of 1980s Paris (Peninsula Press). Riverwork (Coach House Books, May 2026), is an aesthetic and political consideration of care work in novel form. Within the demoted practices of housekeeping, laundering, and archival keeping, a story of the intimacies of research unspools, following the now disappeared Paris industrial river the Bièvre.

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Tickets:

Suggested donation £10-£15. Minimum donation £1.

The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible.