Posted on July 12th, 2021 by Mark Banting

On Saturday 19th June we celebrated Dalloway Day here at Hatchards in collaboration with the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. It was such a fascinating and thought-provoking afternoon inspired by Woolf's short stories, and we promised to put together a little blog post with details of the books and our guests.

The afternoon began with Karina Jakubowicz, host of The Virginia Woolf Podcast, and Woolf scholar Maggie Humm discussing brilliantly the stories brought together in the sequence Mrs Dalloway's Party as well as a broader range of Woolf’s short fiction, weaving them together with the writer’s biography, diary and the Mrs Dalloway novel. Maggie herself is also the author of Talland House.

The second part of the afternoon was a conversation with Cathy Galvin and Elif Shafak on the contemporary short story and story-telling. Cathy Galvin is the Director of Word Factory - a national community of short story writers and readers who have regular salons with authors as well as writers masterclasses and reading groups. A poet herself, Cathy’s published work includes “Black and Blue: a sequence of sonnets” published by Melos Press and her new poem Walking the Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva, which can be found at Guillemot Press. Further, she discussed contemporary writing such as the Cornish Short Stories collection and Kevin Barry’s brilliant That Old Country Music.

Novelist Elif Shafak has numerous remarkable books to her name. On Dalloway Day, we primarily discussed her essay How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division. In this beautifully written and illuminating polemic, Shafak reflects on our age of pessimism, when emotions guide and misguide our politics, and misinformation and fear are the norm. A tender, uplifting plea for optimism, Shafak draws on her own memories and delves into the power of stories to reveal how writing can nurture democracy, tolerance and progress. And in the process, she answers one of the most urgent questions of our time.

Shafak's most recent novel is Ten Minutes Thirty-Eight Seconds in This Strange World. We also had a glimpse at her forthcoming The Island of Missing Trees, which will be published in August this year and you can pre-order here.

And, of great interest to Woolfians everywhere, in late August this year, The Annotated Mrs Dalloway by Merve Emre will be published, and can be pre-ordered below.