Literary Festival 2016: Utopia: getting somewhere or going nowhere? [Audio]

Speaker(s): Toby Litt, Patrick Parrinder, Samantha Shannon | Our panel of authors and experts discuss the history of the utopian genre in literature and its present state. Toby Litt (@tobylitt) is a bestselling and prize-winning writer, whose ten novels to date include Finding Myself and the science fiction Journey into Space, an innovative contribution to the utopian genre. His most recent book is Life-Like, which has been shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2015 and long listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is also Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College. Patrick Parrinder is Emeritus Professor at Reading Univerity and a leading authority on the work of H G Wells, one of the historical founders of the utopian novel. He co-edited The Reception of H G Wells in Europe and was overall editor of the Penguin multi-volume series of H G Wells’s fiction. His most recent publication is Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolut