Charleston Festival - Peter Carey/Julia Briggs

Peter Carey, one of only two authors to have won the Booker Prize twice, finishes off the Charleston Literature Festival with a talk about his latest book, Theft: A Love Story. Carey, an Australian based in New York, uses his home country as the backdrop and inspiration for his work, of which the novels Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang are the most renowned. His latest novel tells of an Australian artist who leaves prison after being jailed for kidnapping his own daughter, and almost immediately gets embroiled in a complicated art heist scam which takes him to New York and Tokyo on the trail of the daughter of a Cubist painter. All sounds a little bit Michael Crichton to me, but you can’t argue with the Booker judges. Can you?

Earlier in the afternoon Julia Briggs, author of Virginia Woolf - An Inner Life, gives are rather more erudite talk about Woolf’s resistance to the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Freud was published by (the Woolf-owned) Hogarth Press, was translated by Bloomsbury insider James Strachey and became a professional role model for the writer’s brother Adrian Stephen. So why, asks Briggs, was Virginia not a disciple? And did she ever change her mind? Briggs is Professor of English Literature and Womens’ Studies at De Montfort University and general editor of the Penguin Virginia Woolf. AL