Guest Authors Talk Letters:
Sigrid Nunez in conversation
with Emma Claire Sweeney
Friday 7 November, 8.00 - 9.00pm
Online (Microsoft Teams)
Tickets: Free
English and Creative Writing at the Open University is delighted to partner with MK Lit Fest to host the grand finale of the department’s international online conference Letters and Literature 1500-2025. In conversation with OU creative writers, guest authors will explore the role letters have played in shaping their own literary lives.
Sigrid Nunez will be talking with Emma Claire Sweeney about the letters of Virginia Woolf: the glimpses they offer into the Bloomsbury set and how this inspired her own novel Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, a mock biography of the Woolfs’ tiny pet monkey. She’ll also share with us the story behind the novel’s reissue with a never-before-published letter by Bloomsbury heir, Nigel Nicolson, who knew Leonard and Virginia Woolf well and remembered Mitz.
Letters of a different kind drew a young Nunez into the orbit of celebrated American essayist Susan Sontag. Nunez will reflect on her experience of being hired by Sontag to type her correspondence, and how this quickly transformed into the profound and complex literary mentorship that Nunez recounts in Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.
In a conversation that will roam across centuries, cultures and genres, Nunez will explore what it means to be a writer during the dying days of the literary letter, and what we might stand to lose – or gain – as the form evolves.
About Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez is the bestselling author of nine novels, a memoir, and a forthcoming collection of short fiction. Her work is published in more than 35 countries.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Nunez has won the National Book Award, the Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Windham Campbell Prize.
The Friend, Nunez’s 2018 novel, is now a film directed by David Siegel and Scott McGehee (2024), starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray. Her 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through, has also been adapted. The Room Next Door (2024) is directed by Pedro Almodóvar and stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.
Nunez has written for the likes of The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and London Review of Books.
More about Sigrid:
About Emma Claire Sweeney
Emma Claire Sweeney is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University. She is also co-director of the Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio, which offers writing retreats in the Little Goat Barn in North Wales and literary mentorships nationwide.
Emma was named as both an Amazon Rising Star and a Hive Rising Writer for her debut novel, Owl Song at Dawn (Legend, 2016), which went on to win Nudge Literary Book of the Year. Emma co-wrote her debut non-fiction book, A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf (Aurum, 2017), with her own friend Emily Midorikawa. In her foreword, Margaret Atwood described the work as a great ‘service to literary history’. Emma has won Society of Authors, Arts Council and Royal Literary Fund awards, and has written for the likes of The Paris Review, TIME, and The Washington Post.
More about Emma:
