First Story Literary Lunches

The First Story Events Committee is pleased to present dates for our forthcoming Literary Lunches:

• Aminatta Forna Tuesday 13th March 2012, noon – 2.30pm, Ognisko Polish Club, 55 Exhibition Road, London Purchase tickets
• P. D. James Tuesday 8th May 2012, noon – 2.30pm, Ognisko Polish Club, 55 Exhibition Road, London Purchase tickets

We are hugely grateful to David Mitchell, Edmund de Waal, John Julius Norwich and Lady Antonia Fraser who have generously given their time and stories to entertain guests at Literary Lunches in London and Oxford. The lunches are in support of First Story’s programme of creative writing workshops for children in challenging social and economic circumstances.

Aminatta Forna was recently awarded the Commonwealth Prize and shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011 for her novel The Memory of Love. In 2003 The Devil that Danced on the Water was runner-up for Britain’s most prestigious non-fiction award, the Samuel Johnson Prize. The book was serialised on BBC Radio, also in The Sunday Times newspaper, and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers series. The Devil that Danced on the Water became a Times newspaper Book Club book. Ancestor Stones was a New York Times Editor’s Choice book and selected by the Washington Post as one of the best novels of 2006. In 2007 she was named by Vanity Fair as one of Africa’s most promising new writers and her work has been translated into nine languages. Aminatta is a former First Story writer-in-residence.

P. D. James was born in Oxford in 1920 and educated at Cambridge High School for Girls. From 1949 to 1968 she worked in the National Health Service and subsequently in the Home Office, first in the Police Department and later in the Criminal Policy Department. All that experience has been used in her novels. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of the Arts and has served as a Governor of the BBC, a member of the Arts Council, where she was Chairman of its Literary Advisory Panel, on the Board of the British Council and as a magistrate in Middlesex and London. She has won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award. She has received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991. In 1997 she was elected President of the Society of Authors. She lives in London and Oxford and has two daughters, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

With thanks to the First Story Events Committee: Beth Colocci, Jules Flory, Susannah Herbert, Nicole Lanitis, Helen Polito, Laurel Rafter, Alison Seaton, Constance Slaughter and Caroline Waldegrave.

For more information, please contact us at info@firststory.org.uk.