Professor Michael Green (Northumbria University), ‘For the Sake of Silence: History, Fiction, and the Spaces In Between’

About the speaker:

Michael Green is Professor in Creative Writing at Northumbria University, and a distinguished Fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where he was Head of the School of Literary Studies, Media, and Creative Arts. His research interests include the uses of history in fiction, which is the subject of his influential monograph Novel Histories: Past, Present, and Future in South African Fiction (Witwatersrand University Press, 1997). He has published around forty journal articles and book chapters, and recently contributed a chapter on ‘The “Experimental Line” in Fiction’ to The Cambridge History of South African Literature (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

As Michael Cawood Green, he is author of two acclaimed works of historical fiction, Sinking: A Verse Novella (Penguin, 1997) and For the Sake of Silence (Umuzi, 2008; Quartet, 2010). For the Sake of Silence, which reconstructs the life of a charismatic Trappist leader who transforms a monastery in nineteenth-century South Africa into one of the largest abbeys in the world, was awarded the prestigious Olive Schreiner Prize. It has been described by the English Academy of Southern Africa as ‘a wonderful history and spell-binding drama’ and by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee as ‘a work of history cum fiction that will grip and sometimes amaze the reader’.

Michael’s lecture on the theory and practice of writing historical fiction will include a reading from his novel.