As Corporate Supporters of the Charleston Trust, the college is supporting this month’s Charleston Festival at Home by sponsoring one of the online events – Salman Rushdie in Conversation with Erica Wagner.
Normally a live face-to-face event, this year’s festival – which started on 15 May and continues until 25 May – is a series of 10 free events bringing together artists, writers, thinkers and changemakers online to explore art, literature and society, just as the Bloomsbury group did around the Charleston dining room table 100 years ago.
The Hurst-sponsored event sees the return of Salman Rushdie to discuss his life and work with writer Erica Wagner. The conversation will be premiered on Charleston’s YouTube channel on the 23rd May at 7pm. Rushdie’s latest novel is Quichotte, an epic for the modern age set in the contemporary US. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirise the culture of his time, so Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse told with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of Rushdie’s work. Salman, who has received many awards for his writing, including the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2008, Midnight’s Children was judged to be the Best of the Booker – the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 40 years.
The Charleston Trust is a charity which receives no public funding, therefore the cancellation of this year’s Charleston Festival and current closure is financially devastating for the trust. The trustees have set up an Emergency Appeal and would be delighted if those who enjoy the online event would consider making a donation.