Sebastian Faulks Opens Connecting Conversations, Autumn/Winter Programme.

The Connecting Conversations series, which brings together leading figures from arts fields with practitioners from the world of psychoanalysis, returns with an event featuring the outstanding and versatile novelist Sebastian Faulks on 15 November 2009.

The former journalist, well-known for novels such as Charlotte Gray and Birdsong, Faulks will discuss his fiction with psychoanalytic psychotherapist Monica Lanman. They will focus in particular on two of his more recent novels, Human Traces and Engleby. Both psychological tours de force, Human Traces is set in the context of the early days of psychiatry and psychoanalysis and Engleby offers a ‘first person’ glimpse from the inside, of severe disturbance.

Sebastian Faulks says: All novelists try to understand character, though I may be unusual in having written a fair bit about how other people – psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts – go about it professionally. There are some overlaps. Although I think the basis of early psychoanalytic writing was flawed, I have great respect for what later practitioners have done and am looking forward very much to any insights that may be brought to my books. Whether I will agree is a different matter.

Psychoanalytic psychotherapist Monica Lanman says,The novelist’s capacity to enter into and give voice to the perceptions and experience of a variety of characters resonates with the concerns and approach of psychoanalytic work. Faulks’ books repeatedly focus on the effects of trauma, and the roots of mental illness, whether in wartime or more broadly, themes which are of particular interest to anyone seeking to understand the minds of others.

The event takes place at the UCL’s Cruciform Building, London WC1.

Connecting Conversations is a series of events bringing together psychoanalysis and other fields. It aims to create a forum where ideas can be explored and new connections developed, both between ideas and disciplines, as well as between people. The series is produced by The Rowan Arts Project, with partners including the British Association of Psychotherapists, British Library, Freud Museum, Institute of Psychoanalysis, Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, the Psychoanalysis Unit at UCL and Women's Therapy Centre.

Listings information

Date: Sunday 15 November 2009

Time: 6.00-7.30pm

Venue: UCL Cruciform Building, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6AE

Tickets: £12/£8 concessions, £10 for Friends of Freud Museum

Free online booking at www.connectingconversations.org, book by phone on 07787 814316 (fee applies for phone bookings).

For press tickets and all other media enquiries contact Ginette Goulston-Lincoln on 07958 448002, [email protected]

Sebastian Faulks was educated at Elstree School, Reading, and Emmanuel College Cambridge and was a journalist until 1991. His first novel, A Trick of the Light, was published in 1984, and was followed by The Girl at the Lion D’Or, the first of three concerned with war-time experience. The next of these, Birdsong is perhaps the best-known, with its interweaving of a love story with an extraordinarily powerful evocation of the traumatic experience of the trenches, and the tunnelling under the battlefields of the First World War. Charlotte Gray, his fifth novel, about the psychological journey of a young Scottish woman involved with the French resistance during the Second World War, was adapted as a film in 2002. In 2008 Sebastian Faulks wrote a one-off James Bond novel, Devil May Care, to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth. He can be heard on Radio 4’s literary quiz The Write Stuff. His latest novel, A Week in December, set in modern London, is due out from Hutchinson in September 2009. He is a Fellow of Royal Society of Literature, was awarded a Hon D Litt from Tavistock Institute and appointed CBE 2002. He lives in London.

Monica Lanman is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and couple therapist. She works at the Tavistock Clinic, the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships and in private practice.

Visit the publisher's website: http://www.connectingconversations.org