Join Glenda Norquay in conversation with Nicholas Murray on the art and craft of literary biography. The event will also launch Glenda’s book Robert Louis Stevenson (Reaktion Books).
The event will be followed by a drinks reception in the Athenaeum Bar. The event is free but booking is essential.
Glenda Norquay is Emeritus Professor of Scottish Literary Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. She is the author of Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading (2007), R.L. Stevenson, Literary Networks and Transatlantic Publishing in the 1890s: The Author Incorporated (2020) and a new biography, Robert Louis Stevenson (2026). She is editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing (2012) and has published extensively on Scottish women’s writing.
Nicholas Murray is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University. He is a poet, critic and literary biographer, the author of lives of Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Bruce Chatwin, Andrew Marvell and Matthew Arnold, among many other books. His biography of Matthew Arnold was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1997 and his biography of Aldous Huxley was shortlisted for the Marsh Biography Prize in 2003. His biography of Franz Kafka has been translated into nine languages. He has been a regular contributor of poems, essays and reviews to a wide range of newspapers and literary magazines. He was born and raised in Liverpool and wrote So Spirited a Town, a literary and personal portrait of the city. He has published three full-length collections of poetry and many pamphlet collections, including Littoral (2024), a sequence about growing up on the Mersey at Crosby Beach.