What's on
The First Free Speech Cafe
Presented by English PEN
Tue 21 Jun 2011, 5:30pm
Free Word Hall
The first in a series of regular events, giving members the opportunity to debate the free speech issues of the moment. Hosted by English PEN staff and trustees, we promise lively speakers and a robust discussion. This 'salon' style event is open exclusively to PEN members and their guests, but anyone interested in joining the debate can come along and join English PEN on the night for just £4 per month.
As the debate rages over super-injunctions, there are angry exchanges between judges, MPs, celebrities, lawyers and journalists. The 'twittersphere' is up in arms about the impact of privacy law on free speech, but others welcome the protection of personal privacy that is afforded by Article 8 of the Human Rights Act. What does this mean for authors? Since earliest times, writers have been inspired by their own lives. Novelists, poets and playwrights base characters on people they know, whilst memoirs and biographies are all about real people. Could a tough new privacy law prevent such work being published or performed? Should authors welcome privacy laws or oppose them? Can we strike a balance between free speech and privacy - and is there really such a difference between kiss-and-tell tabloid journalism and literary memoir? Join a panel of lawyers and authors to debate the impact of privacy on literature, in the first English PEN free speech cafe - a new series of informal events, tackling the most topical controversies in free speech.
Tickets cost £2. Please call 020 7324 2535 to book tickets.
Geoffrey Robertson QC is founder and head of Doughty Street Chambers, the largest human rights practice in the UK. He has appeared in the courts of many countries as counsel in leading cases in constitutional, criminal and international law and served as the first President of the UN War Crimes Court in Sierra Leone, where he authored a landmark decision on the illegality of recruiting child soldiers. He has saved many death row prisoners from execution in common wealth countries, defended in the last two cases brought for blasphemy in Britain (against Salman Rushdie and Gay News), represented Catholic lawyers and youth workers detained without trial in Singapore and was counsel in Bowman v United Kingdom, which established the right of Catholics to campaign effectively against abortion laws during elections. He sits as a recorder, and is a master of Middle Temple and a visiting Professor of Human Rights Law at Queen Mary College, London. In 2008, he was appointed as a distinguished jurist member of the UN's Justice Council. His books include Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice, a memoir, The Justice Game and The Tyrannicide Brief, an award-winning study of the trial of Charles I, and most recently The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse.
David Price QC has practised media law as a solicitor-advocate, barrister and in-house publishing lawyer. One of the UK's leading libel and privacy lawyers, he has acted in a number of high profile cases, acting for Jason Spiller in a test case at the supreme court which redefined rulings on the defence of fair comment. He is currently acting for Imogen Thomas in the Ryan Giggs privacy case.
Miranda Seymour, celebrated both as a novelist and a biographer, has been a visiting professor at Nottingham Trent University, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She has written biographies of Mary Shelley, Ottoline Morrell, Robert Graves and Henry James, amongst others, and in 2008 she was awarded the PEN/Ackerley Prize for In My Father's House, an unflinchingly honest portrait of her father. Her most recent book is Chaplin's Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill.
Jane Haynes is a relational psychotherapist and partner of intheconsultingroom.com London. Previously, a partner at the Group Analytic Practice, London, until summer 2007, when she decided to set up her own partnership with a group of diverse young professionals. Originally trained as an actor at the Royal Court Theatre, Jane trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst at the Society of Analytical Psychology. She is a member of UKCP, The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the Guild of Analytical Psychology and Spirituality. Her memoir, Who is it that can tell me who I am? The journal of a psychotherapist, was originally self-published as an ebook. It was shortlisted for the PEN/Ackerley Prize in 2008 and subsequently published in hard copy by Constable Robinson in 2009.