Join OCLW and the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, our Spring 2024 Weinrebe Lecture.

This very special event will be an in conversation between Michael Ignatieff and Hermione Lee, including some readings by Michael, followed by an audience Q&A at the end. Please join us for drinks following the event.

Michael Ignatieff is a writer, historian, biographer and former politician, currently Rector Emeritus and Professor of History at Central European University, Vienna. His biography of Isaiah Berlin has recently been re-issued by Pushkin Press, and his books include The Needs of Strangers, (1984), Blood and Belonging (1993), The Warrior’s Honour (1998), The Lesser Evil (2004), and On Consolation (2021)

Both biography and memoir are fictions—narratives constructed after the fact from documents, interviews, recollections and memory. Their relation to truth is uncertain and unstable. Michael Ignatieff has written both biography and memoir and is looking forward to the chance to talk with Hermione Lee, herself a biographer and memoirist, about the vexed question of truth in both genres.