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Members’ Event: Margaret Kennedy’s The Feast

To celebrate Faber’s re-release of Margaret Kennedy’s The Feast, originally published in 1950, English PEN will host a special members’ event featuring author Cathy Rentzenbrink and Kate Macdonald, founder of Handheld Press and publisher of Margaret Kennedy’s memoir Where Stands a Wingéd Sentry, in conversation with Faye Hammill, Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow.

The panellists will explore their literary connections with Margaret Kennedy, bestselling writer and longtime member of English PEN, and discuss how the work of women writers is preserved, and often revived, over generations.

This is an exclusive event for English PEN members and Faber members only.

Margaret Kennedy was born in London in 1896 and read History at Somerville College, Oxford in 1915 (alongside Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain) where she began writing. In 1924, Kennedy’s second novel The Constant Nymph became a worldwide bestseller which she adapted into a hit West End play starring Noel Coward (three different star-studded film versions followed). Described as ‘superb’ by Elizabeth Bowen, Kennedy wrote fifteen further prize-winning novels including The Feast in 1950, as well as literary criticism and a biography of Jane Austen. She died in 1967.

02 Jun 2021

7:00 pm

Online

Members' Event

Book Tickets

About the speakers

Cathy Rentzenbrink is the author of The Last Act of Love, A Manual for Heartache and Dear Reader. Her first novel is called Everyone is Still Alive and will be out in July. Cathy regularly chairs literary events, interviews authors, reviews books, runs creative writing courses and speaks and writes on life, death, love, and literature. In previous lives Cathy worked for The Bookseller, The Reading Agency, Quick Reads, and spent ten years at Waterstones. Despite being shortlisted for various prizes, the only thing Cathy has ever won is the Snaith and District Ladies’ Darts Championship when she was 17. She is now sadly out of practice.

Kate Macdonald is a literary historian, an editor and a publisher. She set up Handheld Press to bring forgotten fiction and lost authors back into print, and republished Margaret Kennedy's Where Stands A Wingèd Sentry in 2021. Her own publications include books about the work of John Buchan, Rose Macaulay and twentieth-century popular fiction.

Faye Hammill is Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on British and North American literature of the earlier twentieth century. She wrote about Margaret Kennedy’s novels in her book Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture Between the Wars, and contributed an Introduction to the Handheld Press edition of Where Stands A Wingèd Sentry. Her other publications include Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History and Modernism’s Print Cultures.

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