The Sing in Me, Muse series 2022-23
23 March 2023, 6pm GMT (online)
(This event, initially scheduled for 16 February 2023, has been postponed to 23 March 2023 due to the UCU strike action)
A talk and reading by award-winning writer and classicist Emily Hauser
There has never been a better time to be a woman in Homer.
Fictional retellings of the women of the Trojan War have been flooding onto the market in recent years: Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) and The Women of Troy (2021), Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships (2019), as well as my own For the Most Beautiful (2016).
This talk explores why women are turning to the Trojan War now more than ever, to retell stories from thousands of years ago in their own voices – and in their own ways.
It will also include a reading from For the Most Beautiful, and a Q&A with the author.
The event will be chaired by Isobel Hurst.
Attendance is free, but booking is required. (The Zoom link will be sent shortly before the event itself: check the email with which you registered.) BOOKING IS NOW CLOSED.
Watch the video recording:
The participants
Emily Hauser is an award-winning classicist, Lecturer at the University of Exeter, and the author of the acclaimed Golden Apple trilogy retelling the stories of the women of Greek myth. She has been featured on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour and The Guardian alongside Colm Tóibín and Natalie Haynes, and her debut novel For the Most Beautiful was listed among the “28 Best Books for Summer” in The Telegraph. Her next book, How Women Became Poets, is coming out with Princeton University Press in September 2023.
Isobel Hurst is Lecturer in English in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Goldsmiths and Deputy Director of the CCL. Her research examines the reception of Greek and Latin literature in English, looking at the connection between classical education and authorship and women writers’ creative engagement with the classical tradition. She is the author of Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer (2006) and has published widely on the reception of the classics in English and American literature. She is the convenor (with Lucia Boldrini) of the CCL event series ‘Sing in Me, Muse: The Classical, the Critical and the Creative’.
