Posts Tagged ‘Jane Rogers’

Jane Rogers’ Hitting Trees with Sticks Launch

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Hitting Trees with Sticks

Title: Jane Rogers’ Hitting Trees with Sticks Launch
Location: MadLab
Description: Jane Rogers’ Hitting Trees with Sticks with Annie Clarkson.
Date: 29-11-2012
Start Time: 19:00
End Time: 21:00
Free entry

 

 

 

 

Comma Press invites you to…

Jane Rogers’ Hitting Trees with Sticks
The Manchester Launch
‘Thrilling, ambitious stories that cross continents and soar from cells to stars.’ – Maggie Gee

‘Warm, wise, insightful, sharply observed and beautifully written – each story is a world in microcosm.’ – Marina Lewycka

‘There is nothing predictable about a Jane Rogers story. She has the confidence and skill to inhabit many different voices and different worlds. She slides the reader, in imagination, to a snow-bound France, to Africa, to the Caribbean: she takes us into offices and libraries, under the sea and into the forest, and also into the vast untrodden country of memory that we carry around inside. Her observation of our species is tender, precise, illuminating.’ – Hilary Mantel


                       Jane Rogers  Hitting Trees With Sticks


Join us for the launch of award-winning author Jane Rogers’ debut short story collection Hitting Trees with Sticks, published by Comma, autumn 2012.

About the book

The characters in Jane Rogers’ first short story collection are each blessed with an unwavering conviction. Buoyed up on self-belief, they enthuse, take calculated risks, and refuse to be deterred by the odds stacked against them. But just as Rogers’ compassion as a writer endears us to their cause, her keen eye shows how fine the balance can be between conviction and self-delusion. At times, her subject seems to be the fallibility of any point of view, the persistence of blind spots no matter how careful or intelligent the viewer. Hers are not unreliable narrators, merely human ones – diverse, contradictory, imperfect. Indeed it is often their flaws that beguile us. More info here. 

Jane Rogers has published seven novels, written original television and radio drama, and adapted work (her own and others’) for radio and TV. Her novels include Mr Wroe’s Virgins, The Voyage Home and The Testament of Jessie Lamb (recently long-listed for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, short-listed for the Portico Prize 2012, and awarded the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award.) She has also been short-listed for the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award, came runner-up in the Guardian Fiction Prize, and has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Writers’ Guild Best Fiction Book, and an Arts Council Award. she has also recieved a BAFTA nomination for best drama serial. Jane is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Writing on the MA course at Sheffield Hallam University. For more information, visit janerogers.org.
Supported by Arts Council England

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Alan Turing and Morphogenesis

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

Alan Turing

Title: Alan Turing and Morphogenesis
Location: MadLab
Description: To mark the publication of Litmus, Comma’s latest science-into-fiction project, Manchester’s Literature and Science Festivals present a unique event inspired by the life and work of one of Britain’s greatest scientists, Alan Turing.
Start Time: 14:00
Date: 2011-10-23
End Time: 16:00
Tickets: £5/£3 concessions

To mark the publication of Litmus, Comma’s latest science-into-fiction project, Manchester author Jane Rogers (recently long-listed for the Booker) and MMU scientist Martyn Amos discuss the final theorem of one of Britain’s greatest scientists, Alan Turing. Having invented the very concept of the computer in his 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, then cracked the German Enigma codes and ‘contributed more to the defeat of the Nazis than Eisenhower’, and then gone on to coin the Turing Test concept for artificial intelligence, Turing set about a theory so ahead of its time it is only now finding empirical support, namely Morphogenesis.

This afternoon Jane Rogers reads her specially commissioned short story for Litmus and discusses the influences on Turing’s life as well as the wider relationship between science and literature with consultant scientist, Martyn Amos.

Part of the Manchester Science Festival and Manchester Literature Festival.

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