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An Evening with A. A. Gill

9th February 2016 · 7:00pm - 9:00pm

In person | Virtual event

 An Evening with A. A. Gill

An unmissable evening with A.A.Gill in conversation with John Mitchinson on the occasion of his new book, Pour Me: A Life, his dark yet laugh-out-loud memoir, which charts the soggy tangle of a shredded life; the year between the end of his marriage and the end of his drinking.

The one miserly charity of drink is that it strips away memory. You start by forgetting the last hour of Saturday night, a name, a conversation, how you lost your shoes, and then, as life begins to tumble like an up-ended skier, so the avalanche of forgetting comes and sweeps up the evidence, burying the remembrance in a soft white darkness, a roaring silence. After a time you’ve forgotten more than you can remember. For me, out of a decade I have perhaps two years, perhaps three, of remembrances … There is a hope, if not a reliable fact, that this is the best I can muster, this is a retrospective truth gleaned from the shards and tesserae. An attempt to reimagine something lost, an emotional archaeology. – A.A. Gill

A. A. Gill

A. A. Gill is probably the most read columnist in Britain. Every weekend he entertains readers of The Sunday Times with his biting observations on television and his unsparing, deeply knowledgeable restaurant reviews, which have been published as Paper View and Table Talk. He has written three books on travel: A. A. Gill is Away, Previous Convictions and A. A. Gill is Further Away, as well as two novels, and full-length studies of England, The Angry Island, and America, The Golden Door.

John Mitchinson

John is a writer and publisher. He was Waterstone’s first marketing director before becoming MD at the Harvill Press and then Cassell & Co. In 2001 he joined TV producer John Lloyd to set up QI Ltd. They are currently producing the 13th series of the BBC TV show, and their bestselling QI books have been translated into 29 languages. His latest venture is co-founding Unbound, the UK’s first crowd-funding platform of book which won the 2011 Futurebook Innovation Award for Best Startup and was shortlisted as Independent Publisher of the Year at the 2013 and 2014 Bookseller Awards. John has published a diverse list of authors that includes The Beatles, Michael Palin, Haruki Murakami, Alan Garner, Richard Ford, A.A. Gill and last year’s surprise Christmas bestseller, Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note. John is a Vice-President of the Hay Festival and fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. In his spare time he keeps pigs, sheep, chickens and bees.

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