Join us for the 28th Henry Rowlatt Bickley Memorial Lecture to be given by Thea Lenarduzzi on Tuesday 27 May 2025 at 5.00pm
“Collapsing Houses: A new, unbounded biography of Natalia Ginzburg”
The lecture will also be streamed live (please choose the “online ticket” option when registering for the event so that a link can be sent to you beforehand).
About the talk:
Natalia Ginzburg is one of the most important figures in Italian literature, a Jewish-Catholic antifascist known for unsentimental writing about families during and after the Second World War. Drawing on her own life, Ginzburg wrote across a number of genres, but never really believed in genre. She believed in truth, always, and that the writer’s job lay in capturing it, however oblique, painful, fleeting or contradictory. The question Lenarduzzi will address in her talk is: how do you write the life of a woman who hid almost as much as she shared?
About the speaker:
Thea Lenarduzzi is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and essayist. Her first book, Dandelions (2022), a family memoir and cultural history of migration between Italy and England, was the winner of the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and was shortlisted for the 2023 PEN Ackerley Prize. Her new book, The Tower, is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo in October 2025. She is currently writing the first English-language biography of Natalia Ginzburg, one of Italy’s most important 20th century writers, entitled Collapsing Houses: Pieces of Natalia Ginzburg.
The lecture will be held in Maplethorpe Hall, St Hugh’s College, Oxford on Tuesday 27 May 2025 at 5.00pm, followed by drinks.
To register to attend in person or online please complete the details below (please choose the “online ticket” option when registering for the event so that a link can be sent to you beforehand):
