On 20 June, we held a discussion on women, feminism and power at the University of East Anglia to round up our series of events for the F Word. The event was part of the Worlds Literature Festival. Granta’s Deputy Editor Ellah Allfrey was joined by three contributors to Granta 115: the Indian feminist publisher Urvashi Butalia, Croatian journalist and fiction writer Maja Hrgovic and A.S. Byatt – one of Britain’s finest writers.

Below is a live recording of A.S. Byatt’s reading from an early scene in her novel The Children’s Book. We meet the characters at a garden party in 1895, where a number of women are about to encounter choices not open to those who lived before them. They can go to university, become professionals – yet the characters are questioning why, and how, this has happened.

Click here to read a write up of the event with photographs by the Writers’ Centre Norwich. Also, stay tuned for a podcast of the whole event coming up over the weekend, with readings from all the authors.

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Photographs courtesy of Writers’ Centre Norwich

Also on The F Word Online:

‘The Bible made me a raging heathen feminist. Does that count?’: your unadaluterated Feminist Bibles.

‘…kill something larger than a squirrel at least once a day’, and other Notes for a Young Gentleman from Toby Litt.

Elizabeth Bishop and Sacrificial Feminism: a look at women-only poetry anthologies.

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Granta 115: The F Word