A event held at Bookhaus on Monday 6th November. The event starts at 18:00.
Daisy Lafarge is a writer based in Glasgow, UK. Born in Hastings, she has lived in Scotland since 2011.
She is the author of the novel Paul (Granta 2021; Riverhead 2022), which won a Betty Trask Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and the poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and awarded Scottish Poetry Book of the Year.
In Lovebug, Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life.
Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis – as well as the raw materials of love and life – Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host.
Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.
Daisy will be in conversation with Samantha Walton, a Bristol-based writer, publisher and academic interested in ecology and literature. She is the author of Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure and The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought. She has also published a poetry collection—Self Heal—and a narrative apocalypse poem called Bad Moon. Samantha is Professor of Modern Literature at Bath Spa University, where she runs the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities.
Entry requirements:
She is the author of the novel Paul (Granta 2021; Riverhead 2022), which won a Betty Trask Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and the poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and awarded Scottish Poetry Book of the Year.
In Lovebug, Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life.
Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis – as well as the raw materials of love and life – Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host.
Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.
Daisy will be in conversation with Samantha Walton, a Bristol-based writer, publisher and academic interested in ecology and literature. She is the author of Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure and The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought. She has also published a poetry collection—Self Heal—and a narrative apocalypse poem called Bad Moon. Samantha is Professor of Modern Literature at Bath Spa University, where she runs the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities.
Entry requirements:
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