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Losing the Plot: Reading, writing, realism and reality

Join us for our annual lecture, which this year will be delivered by novelist, memoirist and academic, Sarah Moss. Author of nine novels and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Sarah has been publishing for almost twenty years.

Sarah’s lecture will examine ‘ideas of progress, agency and the oppression and liberation of literary form’:

‘I grew up in a Victorian house in a Victorian city reading Victorian fiction, and accepted that these were the forms of realism. I felt at home with an omniscient narrator well-educated in the European canon, with a disadvantaged but plucky young protagonist and the promise of a meaningfully tragic but more usually happy ending. Victorian parents, it turned out, were right to worry about the corrupting effect of too much fiction on young minds. Forty years later, the chasms between reality and realism are obvious and fascinating, the ideological nature (or culture) of the realist tradition clear, and yet I continue to write to and from that heritage. This lecture will speak from both sides and from the gap between fiction and the unwieldy kind of writing known as life writing, creative non-fiction, memoir. I will think and play with ideas of progress, agency and the oppression and liberation of literary form, looking forward and back from writing in midlife’

The lecture will be followed by a short Q&A.

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Sarah Moss is a writer and academic. Her ninth novel, Ripeness, was published in 2025. Sarah’s second novel, Night Waking (2011), won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Her non-fiction book Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland followed one year later and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. Her novels Bodies of Light (2014), Signs for Lost Children (2015) and The Tidal Zone (2016) were all shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. Ghost Wall (2018) was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Polari Prize, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Sarah was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. She is a regular contributor to the Irish Times.

‘Her work is as close to perfect as a novelist’s can be’ – The Times

‘Tender and rueful . . . Sarah Moss is a marvel of insight and eloquence’ – Emma Donoghue

‘One of our greatest living writers’ – Katherine May, author of Wintering

‘Throws much contemporary writing into the shade’ – Hilary Mantel

‘One of our very best contemporary novelists’ – Independent

‘A brilliant mind’ – The Guardian

‘Moss has quietly been putting out some of the most interesting and carefully sculpted novels of recent years’ – Financial Times

‘One of the finest contemporary writers working in Britain today’ – Stylist

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The Stinging Fly is a literary magazine, a book publisher, an education provider, and an online platform. A registered charity, our mission is to seek out, nurture, publish and promote the very best new writers and new writing.

Our Annual Lecture began as an initiative of Words Ireland and Bray Literary Festival in 2018. Each year since then we have commissioned a writer to reflect upon their experience of the writing life and the development of their creative practice. Previous lectures, which are all available to read on our website, have been delivered by Sean O’Reilly and Jan Carson (2018), Mia Gallagher (2019), Paul Lynch (2020), Kevin Power (2022), Evelyn Conlon (2023), and Anne Haverty (2024).