Sam Byers in conversation with Naomi Booth

Sam Byers is the author of Idiopathy (2013); Perfidious Albion (2018); and Come Join Our Disease (2021). His work has been translated into multiple languages and his writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement. Idiopathy was included on the Waterstones 11 list of debut novels to watch out for, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Prize, longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize, and won a Betty Trask Award. Perfidious Albion was longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and shortlisted for the Encore Prize.

Naomi Booth is a fiction writer who lives in Yorkshire, in the north of England. Her work explores unsettling landscapes, strange compulsions, and aberrant bodies. Her debut novel, Sealed, is a work of eco-fiction that has been described as 'the perfect modern horror' (Helen Marshall) and 'marvellous ... though not for the faint-hearted' (The Guardian). Sealed was shortlisted for the Not the Booker Award in 2018 and is published in the UK and the US. Naomi's first work of fiction, the novella The Lost Art of Sinking, is set in the Yorkshire Pennines and tells the story of a girl who compulsively passes out. It won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella 2016. Her most recent novel, Exit Management (2020), moves between contemporary London and mid-20th century Budapest, and has been reviewed as a "timely and original dissection of class and desperation in Brexit Britain".

This reading is part of the 2023 Summer School in MLAC ‘Dis/connections. Connectivity and Digitality in Contemporary German Literature’

Through a multidisciplinary engagement with contemporary literature in German, this academic summer school critically explores the phenomenon of global connectivity.  Drawing on the insight that such connectivity is both a result of the pervasive influence of digital media today and itself perpetually mediated through contemporary culture, we focus on the role of digital networks in, and for, contemporary German literature.  Focusing on various manifestations of digital connectivity - from social networks and new kinds of interpersonal communication to contemporary forms of digital governmentality and data mining - we are particularly interested in the ways in which literary texts represent, interrogate, and are themselves affected by the profoundly ambivalent effects of such connectivity. 

Join us on 26 July 2023 in  Elvet Riverside I, room 140 at 6pm.