A filmed conversation between Ken Worpole and Patrick Wright:
On Tuesday, 8 June 2021, in the Swedenborg Society library in Bloomsbury, writers Ken Worpole and Patrick Wright were invited to sit down and discuss their distinctive approaches to researching and writing literary and social history. Both had new books published: Ken’s No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: back to the land in wartime Britain (Little Toller Books), and Patrick’s The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness (Repeater Books). Having known each other for nearly forty years, the two authors have pursued many of the same topics and interests, notably the ‘unfamiliar territories’ of urban memory, dislocation and representation, marginal literary cultures and landscapes, and pastoral disenchantment and rural modernism–largely through the close-focus lens of specific times, people and places.
Ken’s book No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: back to the land in wartime Britain tells the story of a group of Christian pacifists who established a successful farming settlement in deep Essex in 1942, true to the spirit of Tolstoy, D H Lawrence, and new ideas in religious philosophy current at the time. It is based on the memories of those who had grown up there, together with the evidence of letters, diaries, newsletters and photographs, most never before seen or published.
Patrick’s book The Sea View Has Me Again tells the story of the originally East German novelist Uwe Johnson and the decade (1974-84) he spent as a voluntary exile from Berlin living in a house overlooking the outer reaches of the Thames estuary at Sheerness on Kent’s Isle of Sheppey. It opens out to provide an alternative vision of post-war British history, told through the rich and haunted landscapes of a deindustrialized and often spurned downriver mudbank.
A Swedenborg House Production
Filmed and edited by Jacob Cartwright
© Swedenborg House/ Ken Worpole/Patrick Wright 2021
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