Sebastian Faulks, eminent novelist, will speak at The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust’s Annual General Meeting on September 25th.
The Trust recognised the contribution Sebastian Faulks’ work has made to increasing public awareness of the challenges involved in understanding the mind by awarding him an honorary doctorate in 2007.
Sebastian Faulks was educated at Wellington College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was the first literary editor of The Independent and became deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday before leaving in 1991 to concentrate on writing. He was a columnist for the Guardian from ’92 – ’98, for the Evening Standard from ’97 – ’99, and continues to write articles and reviews for a number of newspapers and magazines as well as contributing to a variety of television programmes. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1995, and was awarded the CBE in 2002.
His first novel, A Trick of the Light, was published in 1984, and was followed by The Girl at the Lion D’Or, the first of three concerned with war-time experience. The next of these, Birdsong is perhaps the best-known. Charlotte Grey, his fifth novel, about the psychological journey of a young Scottish woman involved with the French resistance during the Second World War, was adapted as a film in 2002, and the same process is underway for Birdsong.
Sebastian Faulks and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, seem to have some history in common; both started with a preoccupation with the extreme experience of war, and went on to become interested in the question of how to understand and treat mental illness. Sebastian’s novel ‘Human Traces’ is set in the late Victorian period and follows the mission of its two main protagonists to find the origins of mental illness and to understand the way the human mind works.
His recent novel, Engleby, is a kind of who-dunnit, narrated in the voice of the disturbed central character. Intriguingly he then accepted a commission to write the latest James Bond novel, ‘Devil May Care’, to be published in May, 2008.
We are delighted to have this opportunity to listen to Sebastian Faulks discuss his work to date.
