Writing About Monsters, RSL

From Shakespeare’s Richard III to Richardson’s Lovelace, literature’s most enthralling characters are often its most depraved villains. Literary biographers, Lucy Hughes-Hallett and Richard Davenport-Hines will discuss this phenomenon at the Royal Society of Literature's ‘Writing about Monsters,’ held at the Courtauld Institute of Art as part of the Roy Jenkins Memorial series.
Both writers are well placed to discuss the lure of villainy. Hughes-Hallett is an author of non-fiction, most recently acclaimed for The Pike, a biography of the dissipate Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio for which she won three major awards, including the highly prestigious Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.
Davenport-Hines is an equally prolific writer, editor and student of the villainous. Among his achievements are a collection of essays entitled Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin, and a collection of poetry and prose entitled Vice: An Anthology, as well as critical studies of Proust and Ivy Compton-Burnett.
The event will be chaired by Selina Hastings, herself an acclaimed biographer of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. She will curate what is sure to prove a fascinating discussion of the lure which the monstrous holds for the writer, exploring enduring questions about how and why writers find evil such an irresistible topic.