Past Events
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When Shelly Powers was 7 years old, she told her mother that she’d marry Elvis Presley when she grew up. She did just that ? although her Elvis was an impersonator, a tribute artist she met in Las Vegas. However, over her 12 years of living in Vegas, Shelly became involved with Elvis International, where one of her roles was to interview Elvis’s friends and associates. Her first interview was with his personal photographer, Ed Bonja. What started as one interview became many more, and from those grew friendships with people in Elvis’s circle.
Now Shelly has published a book, Elvis Remembered in which each of the 11 of Elvis’s intimates has a great story. On 3 November, Shelly will be joining Lucinda Hawksley to reveal some of those stories and to talk about her own journey to create the book. This special Goldster event is an absolute must for all fans of ‘the King’, and for everyone who wants to hear a really unusual insiders’ Inside Story! Come along and be part of the Goldster Conversation.
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On 2 November, Lucinda Hawksley will be talking to Wendy Moore about her latest book, Endell Street: The Women who ran Britain’s Trailblazing Military Hospital. It tells the story of two pioneering women doctors, Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray, who set up and ran a major military hospital in London during the First World War. Anderson and Murray were suffragettes and life partners, and the first to take a team of women to France to run an emergency hospital in Paris. They were so successful they were invited by the British Army to run a hospital in the heart of London, in Covent Garden’s Endell Street. Theirs was the only hospital within the British Army to be staffed by women – all the doctors, nurses and orderlies were female, apart from a dozen or so male helpers. Endell Street became renowned as the ‘most popular’ hospital in the First World War – but that did nothing to help its women pioneers when peace came. Endell Street: The Women who ran Britain’s Trailblazing Military Hospital was serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week.
Come and discover the inside story as Wendy chats to Lucinda about this latest book, as well as her career in journalism and her other titles, on medical and social history. Join them and be part of the Goldster Conversation.
The Whalebone Theatre is a debut novel written by a creative writing teacher, and it has so much to say to the Goldster readership. It follows the lives of a family from 1919 to 1945, and it’s a world into which you will find yourself drawn from the very first page.
We first meet one of the protagonists, Cristabel, as a determined three-year-old. The story follows her life and those of her family members and servants, on an inter-War country estate. The whalebone theatre of the title is not a metaphor, it is a real theatre made from the ribcage of a whale that washes up on the Dorset coast. As Cristabel and her siblings create the theatre and take on roles that suit them, they soon discover that the coming second war is going to recreate the roles they thought had been assigned to them in life.
This is a beautifully written novel, with so much we can discuss. Join Lucinda Hawksley to chat about it – and about the Goldster book club in general – in our monthly event exclusively for members, with no recording and no muting. Come along, whether you’re a regular Book Club attendee, or have never been before. Everyone is welcome.
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Join the Goldster conversation with Lucinda Hawksley as she chats to the author Francesca Wade about her fascinating debut book, Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London between the Wars. It looks at the lives of five extraordinary women, including Virginia Woolf and Dorothy L Sayers, all of whom lived in the same square in London. Square Haunting was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Francesca is now working on her second book, about Gertrude Stein. Her work proposes a form of biography centered on women’s lives, on collectivity and community, on recovering hidden histories, and on challenging the scripts by which lives are lived and stories are told.
Francesca is a former editor of the literary quarterly the White Review, and her writing has appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and the Paris Review. She will be talking to Lucinda on 26 October, as 12pm. Come along and discover more about the intriguing lives of the women whom Francesca has brought back to life in the pages of her book.
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Adrian Magson is the author of hundreds of short stories and 29 books and an acclaimed expert in creating fictional characters. In his crime-thriller series we meet private detectives partners Ruth Gonzales and Andy Vaslik; deep cover specialist, Marc Portman; spy Harry Tate; French 1960s crime fighter Lucas Rocco, and others. He is so prolific that he has not one, but two most recently published books, Death at the Old Asylum in which Inspector Rocco becomes enveloped in a case of cold-blooded execution and Killing Waters, a stand-alone murder investigation set on the Oxford Canal in the Midlands.
Adrian’s work has been praised for its strong female characters, realism, intrigue, grit and fast pace. Join Lucinda Hawksley with Adrian in the Goldster Conversation to discuss his wide body of work, his favourite series, the source of his ideas and writing techniques across the genres. Adrian also used to be a Tae Kwon Do instructor and you’ll hear about that, too. Goldster Inside Story, 12.00 Thursday October 19th 2023.
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Calling all fans of Jane Austen. On 13 October, Lucinda will be interviewing Ruth Leigh, author of A Great Deal of Ingenuity: A Collection of Pride and Prejudice Stories. The pages of Pride and Prejudice sparkle with household names: proud Darcy and prejudiced Elizabeth, book-loving Mr Bennet, the snobbish Bingley sisters, predatory Mr Wickham and oily Mr Collins. But what about all the other people busy cooking, mending, flirting, walking and socialising in the background?
In this collection of short stories, Ruth shines a light on the lives of nine characters from the novel. How is married life at Hunsford? Will Maria Lucas ever find a husband? How does Sally the maid feel about mending Lydia’s worked muslin gown? Which Meryton matron will triumph in luring a marriageable young man into their parlour? This charming collection of stories gives the reader a window into the worlds of Meryton, Rosings Park, Pemberley and Hunsford as you’ve never seen them before.
Ruth Leigh is also the author of the witty Isabella M Smugge series about a single parent of four who moves from London to the countryside, becoming an “Instamum” and turning her life into an award-winning ‘brand’ yet struggling with the actual, non-Instagram realities of life. Find out more in the Goldster Inside Story on 13 October.
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Jim Kelly is the son of a Scotland Yard detective – something which would later inspire his writing. After studying geography – especially landscape – at Sheffield University Jim went into newspapers, ending up as education correspondent of the Financial Times. During this time, he moved to live Ely, in the Cambridgeshire Fens – a move inspired by The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers, his favourite English crime novel. He says of his work, “Sayers’ combination of landscape and plot is always my aim”.
While being a long-distance commuter from Ely to London, Jim wrote his first two books on the train – both are set in and around Ely, and feature a journalist, Philip Dryden, who works on the local paper, The Crow. The seven Dryden books won an award called the Dagger in the Library – a crime-writing ‘Oscars’. His second series, based on the North Norfolk Coast, won the New Angle Prize for Literature. His last three crime novels were set in Cambridge during WW2 and were nominated for an Historical Dagger. Last year saw the publication of The Silent Child – an historical thriller, under the name J G Kelly. Jim will be chatting to Lucinda Hawksley on the Inside Story on 12 October, a few days after the publication of his latest book,The White Lie – based on Captain Scott’s Last Expedition. Join them at 12pm and become part of the Goldster Conversation.
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Rory Cellan-Jones became a much-loved household name as the BBC Technology Correspondent. Since being diagnosed with Parkinson in 2019, he has pioneered a greater understanding of the disease among all of us with his articles and the illuminating and moving podcast Movers and Shakers. Fellow Parkinson colleagues such as Jeremy Paxman, Mark Mardell and Sir Nicholas Mostyn show how different personalities face up to setbacks. Rory is the best-selling author of Always On – Hope and Fear in the Smartphone Era and his new book, Ruskin Park; Sylvia, Me and the BBC, tells his own tender and troubling story. After his mother’s death, he discovered a file labelled ‘For Rory…in the hope that it will help him understand how it really was.’ He was the child of a love affair between two BBC employees and his mother Sylvia, single parented two sons in a one-bedroom flat while working full time.
In this inspiring and moving Goldster Inside Story meet Rory in conversation with Humphrey Hawksley to hear about understanding technology, living with Parkinson’s and discovering secrets from childhood and how all that makes you the person you are. Can we ever really know the truth about our parents? This is a live in-audience Goldster Conversation at the Riverstone Theatre in Fulham.
To come along e-mail [email protected] 12.00 Thursday October 5th 2023.
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On 22 September, join Lucinda Hawksley as she speaks to a man who isn’t there… JD Kirk is the author of the multi-million bestselling DCI Jack Logan crime fiction series, set in the Highlands of Scotland. He also does not exist. Instead, JD is the pen name of former children’s author and screenwriter, Barry Hutchison, who was born and raised in Fort William.
His latest title, A Dead Man Walking is the 18th book in the number-one-bestselling DCI Jack Logan series, perfect for fans of Ian Rankin, Stuart MacBride, and Agatha Christie. Its setting is a remote Highland castle, on a dark and stormy night. When an elderly billionaire is discovered dead in the locked study of his stately Highland home, DCI Jack Logan and his team must race the worsening weather to get to the scene of the crime. Jack finds no shortage of suspects. Everyone, it seems, had reason to want the old man dead, and they all have something to hide – but the castle’s residents won’t give him a minute to think. Not even the dead ones…
Including his books as JD Kirk, Barry has written over 200 novels, countless comics, and dozens of TV episodes. He still lives in the Highlands with his wife and children. He has no idea what the JD stands for.