Revealing the Hidden Life.

Damon Galgut talks about his novel Arctic Summer, what drew him to EM Forster, and how Forster’s hidden life brought on his writer’s block.

“I’m fascinated, in a literary sense, by that: what happens if you don’t express what you’re feeling? I’m interested in what’s not said, what’s not acted upon, and the kind of plot that might arise from inaction”

Damon Galgut at Kings Place

Win tickets to see Damon Galgut at a special Gay’s the Word event as well as a copy of his novel Arctic Summer.

[rating=5]
368 pages • Atlantic Books • March 06, 2014 [HB]
Damon Galgut’s remarkable novel Arctic Summer imagines the life of the great novelist E.M. Forster and the conflicts that led him to write A Passage to India.

“Forster knew when his great work had been completed, and the wonder in Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer is that it enables the reader to feel both the triumph as well as the pain at the heart of this conflict. “

[rating=4]
198 pages • Penguin • 1971

This pre-WW1 novel, finished in 1914 yet not published until 1971, is a great work about the struggle of Maurice Hall to come to terms with his sexuality.

In 1911 Forster wrote in his diary of his “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat – the love of men for women and vice versa”. In Maurice Forster tackled the subject of homosexuality and assessed what it meant. Maurice is as pioneering a book now as it was then.