Julian Hoffman and Ruth Padel in Conversation

Join us for an event with Julian Hoffman and Ruth Padel in conversation.

Julian Hoffman and his wife Julia found themselves disillusioned with city life in the summer of 2000. Overwhelmed by long commutes, they stumbled upon a book about Prespa, Greece – a remote corner of Europe filled with stone villages, snow-capped mountains and wildlife. What began as curiosity soon transformed into a life-changing decision: to make Prespa their home. Lifelines is not only the tale of a courageous leap into a new life, but of seasons punctuated by unforgettable encounters, from a stare-down with a bear surrounded by Spring wildflowers to a deep-winter meeting with fourteen wrens sheltering above a frozen doorway.

Girl, Padel’s thirteenth collection, paints a portrait in verse of the two iconic female figures – the Virgin Mary and the Cretan ‘snake goddess’ – unravelling the millennia of myth men have woven around them, and exploring the notion of girlhood itself. Girl is an exciting, modern mythic retelling that is both accessible as poetry and thought-provoking. Padel takes the perspective of these two figures to explore girlhood and the question of why we have for thousands of years used – and still use – the figure of a teenage girl to represent a goddess or a soul. In playful, dark and witty poems, she gives these much-interpreted girls agency and a voice.