Salonkultur - Der Literarische Salon - Berlin

Litrarische Salonkultur

Veranstaltungen 2017
Gelaufene Veranstaltung

Donnerstag, 11. Mai 2017 um 20.30 Uhr
in der Z-BAR

Reading & Discussion

Kevin McAleer reads from his manuscript “Errol Flynn: A Life in Verse (1909-1959)”

This series is sponsored by the Senate of Berlin (Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa).Conceptual assistance and the series title from Julia Eve Föll.

Errol Flynn had everything – beauty, wit, charm, intelligence, talent, charisma, money, and a huge following of devoted fans and willing women. He was the classic image of a swashbuckling hero and romantic lover. But somewhere along the path to movie immortality he embarked on a destructive lifestyle that wrecked his career and ultimately killed him. Why did it happen? What were the forces at work in this complex man whose own father regarded him as an “enigma”?

Kevin McAleer is not the first author to wend his way through the maze of myth and falsehood that comprises Flynn’s legend, but no one has yet attempted a book-length narrative of his life in verse. Flynn’s amanuensis Earl Conrad called him “one of the most poetic men I have ever met,” and it is McAleer’s view that other accounts of Flynn have failed to capture his verve and essential spirit, which had greater affinity to an age of high-flown lyricism than to our own prosaic times. Flynn himself was fond of claiming that he’d been born into the wrong century, so McAleer is taking him at his word and recounting his saga in the same way as did English balladeers the tale of Robin Hood – Flynn’s most memorable screen incarnation.

Employing the mock-epic ottava rima stanza, Kevin McAleer reads from the manuscript of his finally completed decade-long project “Errol Flynn: A Life in Verse (1909-1959).”
 Carey Harrison
Bild: © privat
Carey Harrison is an English novelist and dramatist. He was born in 1944 in London to actors Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer and raised in Los Angeles and New York where he attended the Lycée Français. He is the author of forty stage plays and sixteen novels. Harrison’s most recent novels Justice and Who Was That Lady? have been acclaimed by readers and both reached No.1 on the Amazon Contemporary Fiction downloads list. His latest novel How to Push Through was published in 2016. Harrison has received numerous grants from the UK Arts Council and his prizes include the Sony Radio Academy Award, the Giles Cooper Award, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Play, and the Best Play award from the Berlin Akademie der Künste as well as two nominations (2005 and 2007) for the Pushcart Prize for Journalism. His work has been translated into thirteen languages. He himself has published translations from French, Italian, German and Spanish authors, and there have been performances of his translations from the works of Pirandello, Goldoni, Feydeau and Gert Hofmann; most recently he published “20 Poems” from the Arabic of Firas Sulaiman, in Banipal, the UK magazine of contemporary Arabic writing. Harrison’s essays have appeared in magazines as diverse as New Politics, a journal of socialist thought, and Chronicles, a paleoconservative magazine of American culture; he has also been a book reviewer for numerous newspapers and journals. A new opera based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, set to music by Nolan Gasser and with a libretto by Harrison, was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera House and premiered in March 2013, playing to sold-out audiences; three further opera companies are currently planning productions of the opera. Harrison lives in upstate New York with his wife, the artist Claire Lambe, and is Professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is presently in the German capital as a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Moderation: Carey Harrison
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