About Durrell 2012.

DURRELL 2012: THE LAWRENCE DURRELL CENTENARY

WEDNESDAY, 13 JUNE 2012 – SATURDAY, 16 JUNE 2012

GOODENOUGH COLLEGE :: LONDON

THE BRITISH LIBRARY :: LONDON

The year 2012 will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990).

A celebrated novelist, poet, and travel writer, Durrell is most remembered for the novels comprising The Alexandria Quartet (1957 – 1960), along with a trio of island books, Prospero’s Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corcyra (1945), Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes (1953), and Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957).

The International Lawrence Durrell Society will celebrate the 2012 Lawrence Durrell Centenary by holding a world-class gathering of readers, scholars, archivists, and distinguished speakers in London, the city that looms behind all other Durrellian cities, real or imagined.

“It is important that conference participants get a sense of what he experienced, and of some of the sites that appear in his first three novels[. . . .] Durrell was a writer extremely attuned to place, and he wrote about the ‘spirit of place.’ He might have decried ‘Pudding Island,’ yet it was where he first heard the sound of his own voice, where he picked up the impressions that would go into his first really successful novel, THE BLACK BOOK.”

— IAN MACNIVEN, author of LAWRENCE DURRELL: A BIOGRAPHY (1998).

Working jointly with the Lawrence Durrell Estate, Curtis Brown, Faber & Faber, and the British Library, the International Lawrence Durrell Society will host the 2012 Durrell Centenary at London House, on the grounds of Goodenough College.

The placement of the 2012 Centenary events is indeed a happy one: Goodenough College sits among the very Bloomsbury squares and side-streets where the young Lawrence Durrell lived, loved, and brought to completion his earliest works.

“It is good news and fitting that in the year of Lawrence Durrell’s centenary the International Lawrence Durrell Society’s On Miracle Ground gathering will take place in London where Durrell’s literary career began. [These are] the streets where Durrell lived, read, was published, romanced with Nancy [. . .] a landscape he never left behind.”

— MICHAEL HAAG, author of ALEXANDRIA: CITY OF MEMORY (2004).

With its quiet gardens and the old-world elegance of its Great Hall and Large Common Room, Goodenough College is ideally appointed, hidden away from the noise and traffic of London, yet immediately accessible to the Eurostar terminal at St. Pancras, two National Rail terminals, and two London Underground stops.

View the expanded program for Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary.

View the online registration form for Durrell 2012: The Lawrence Durrell Centenary.