Renowned UK author Ros Barber for the Malta Book Festival 2017

Renowned UK author Ros Barber will be flying to Malta next week as a special guest of the Malta Book Festival 2017, where she is due to appear in two separate events – a conference on ‘Truth in Fiction and Non-fiction’ and an event dedicated to herself and her work. During this event, she will be talking to James Corby, senior lecturer and head of the Department of English at Malta University, about her books, her literary career and the themes and concerns that preoccupy her as a contemporary author and as a scholar.

Currently a lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, Barber’s main interest is Early Modern literary biography, with research focused primarily on Shakespeare and Elizabethan poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe. It was as part of her doctoral studies that in 2012 she published her first novel, The Marlowe Papers. A rara avis, according to a Guardian literary review, the novel is an ambitious and ingenious work of fiction. It tells the story of Christopher Marlowe as William Shakespeare, with the death of the former in a tavern brawl revealed as a staged exit that allowed the dramatist and spy to escape to Italy and assume his new identity as ‘the Bard of Avon’ before returning to England to write what most consider to be the finest drama pieces in the entire history of mankind.

The hypothesis upon which Barber builds her narrative, the so-called Marlovian Theory of Shakespeare Authorship has been all but discredited by mainstream schools of literary history. In a number of academic papers, the author has argued against this refutation, claiming that a proper study of the Warwickshire dialect opens up a number of questions that seem to point, by implication, to the possibility of Marlovian authorship. What matters for the novel, however, is the problem it poses: if the elements of narration are purely conjectural or, even worse, the by-products of sloppy research, then what would be the point of the creative elements of the work? Poetry, no matter how good, cannot conceivably resort the truth in such a text? If, on the other hand, the research is indeed scientific, valid and thorough, why would you choose poetry to represent it? Would the truths of such research not be more readily accessible to readers if the author presented them in a more orthodox manner?

Her second novel, Devotion, is set in a near future scenario where authorities seem resolved to have religious fundamentalism classified as a form of mental illness. The legacy of Richard Dawkins, whose death is reported as a recent event in the opening pages of the novel, reigns supreme. The reader follows the thoughts of Finlay Logan, a criminal psychologist who must assess the mental health of a young woman who has blown up a bus, causing the death of fifteen teenagers. At the same time, Logan is mourning the death of her daughter in a traffic accident. The two events merge thematically in Logan’s mind – both events involve tech- nological death (by automotive vechiles), both have a religious dimension (one assigned by the killer onto the crime, the other one assigned by tradition on all cases of bereavement). The relationship between science, technology, and religion – difficult if not impossible to extract from the raw material of life experiences – might still be amenable to psychological inquiry. Or, at least, that’s what Logan comes to believe.

Barber has also written three books of poetry. The most recent, Material, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. These include Faber’s Poems of the Decade and Penguin’s The Poems of Sex.

During the Festival event, which will take place at Activity Area of the Mediterranean Conference Centre in Valletta, 11 November starting at 12 noon, there will be selected readings of excerpts of Barber’s work – both prose and poetry. At the end there will be a Q&A session with the author and members of the public will have the opportunity to buy Barber’s books and have them signed by the author.

Ros Barber