We are delighted that Tom Crewe will talk about his remarkable, critically acclaimed debut, The New Life. In 2023 he won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Southbank Sky Arts Award for Literature and was given the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. The New Life is set in the 1890s and, although it’s fiction, is inspired by the historical figures John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis who collaborated on an audacious early text about human sexuality. The novel is a dramatic imagining of social change, especially regarding LGBT and women’s civil rights. Tom has a doctorate in nineteenth-century British history. He is an editor at the London Review of Books, regularly contributing essays and reviews.

Photograph c. Jon Tonks