Weinrebe Lecture: '"The Silver Book": Olivia Laing in Conversation with Charlie Lee-Potter'

Weinrebe Lecture:

The Silver Book: Olivia Laing in Conversation with Charlie Lee-Potter

A collaboration with the Department of English and Creative Writing, Goldsmiths.

Join us for an evening with Olivia Laing, who will discuss their latest novel, The Silver Book,  and the role of life-writing in their novels, criticism, and non-fiction in conversation with Charlie Lee-Potter.

It is dangerous to want someone this much. He has always known it, from the very first night.

It is September 1974. Two men meet by chance in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realising the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young – and beautiful – apprentice is just what he needs.

He sweeps Nicholas to Rome, into the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. Then in the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism. But Nicholas has a secret, and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amidst the rising tensions of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn’t intend.

Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book (2025) is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller, set in the dream factory of cinema. It’s a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.
 

Speaker details:

Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They’re the author of eight books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time. Laing’s first novel, Crudo, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2018, they were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. They’re an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts, and their books have been translated into twenty-one languages.

The Silver Book will be published in November 2025. It’s a queer love story and a noirish thriller set in the dream factory of Italian cinema in the 1970s, where nothing is as it seems.

Charlie Lee-Potter is an award-winning writer, poet and artist. She’s a former BBC foreign correspondent and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s PM, The World at One and Open Book. Charlie is the recipient of the International Créateurs Prize for Creative Journalism, and her podcast, Inside A Mountain, has been shortlisted for the International Women’s Podcast Awards. She holds two doctorates and is a lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. Her poetry collection, A Line is a Breathless Length, will be published this winter.

Further Details and Contacts:

After the event, join us for a drinks reception in the Cinema Café.

This in-person event is free and open to all. Registration is required.

This event will not be recorded.

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to Dr Amy Sackville.