Will Buckingham's Blog, page 10

Now Represented by C+W

I’m very pleased to have found myself a new agent at C+W, where I will be represented by the excellent Emma Fine. I’m very much looking forward to getting started on work with Emma on two non-fiction projects that have been in the works for a long time: one big, single-themed project that ranges across anthropology, philosophy, literature, history and other such things, and also a memoir with Chinese characteristics or 中国特色 (as they say in the PRC). Or at least with Chinese philosophical characteristics. I’ll post more news about both of these projects once they are up and running.

The link to my bio page on C+W’s website is here.

A Practical Guide to Happiness: New Edition out in 2018

I’m delighted that my introductory guide to the philosophies of happiness is to be re-released in early 2018 by Icon Books. It’s also got a handsome new cover. I’ll post on this blog when the book is out.

 

Women in Philosophy Course on Highbrow

I’m really excited to be launching my Women in Philosophy mini-course today over on highbrow. It’s a ten day course that covers everything and everyone from Diotima and Hypatia to Judith Butler and Kimberlé Crenshaw. It’s been hugely stimulating and challenging to write, and has provoked me into thinking once again about the misogyny and sexism of the Western philosophical tradition. Here’s a list of all the philosophers covered:

Diotima of Mantinea
Hypatia of Alexandria
Héloïse
Hildegard von Bingen
Mary Wollstonecraft
Simone de Beauvoir
Hannah Arendt
Judith Butler
Martha Nussbaum
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Kathryn T. Gines

There are so many other philosophers and thinkers I could have included. But in a mini-course with only ten five-minute lessons, space was limited. If you sign up to Highbrow (the course is a premium course, but you can sign up for a month for free), let me know how you get on.

Letyar Tun in Conversation

I’m very much looking forward to interviewing Burmese writer, translator and photojournalist Letyar Tun at Aston University on Thursday 9th November at 6pm. The event is one of three launching the British Council’s collection Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds: Contemporary Short Stories from Myanmar.

There’s a link to the event here. It’s free to attend.

Teaching at the OU and OCA

After a pause of a few months, I’m pleased to be back to teaching again. I’ve always found teaching and writing mutually supportive, so I’m delighted to be working on the second year of the Open University MA course in Creative Writing, and on the BA in Creative Writing at the Open College of the Arts. Term starts soon, and so I’m looking forward to virtually meeting my new students in the next couple of weeks.

Messages, in The Amorist

I’m very pleased to see my new short story, ‘Messages’, published in vol 6 of The Amorist, the magazine ‘for devotees of love and passion.’ It is a tale of distance, desire and the power of words. The Amorist should be available from all good newsagents.

Talking About Orpheus in Sofia

This was recorded last December, but I forgot to post it back then, so I thought I should add this link to a video of my Bulgarian TV interview with the excellent Dessie Mikova about my novel The Descent of the Lyre. It was recorded last December when I was over in Sofia.

In this interview, you will note that I become miraculously fluent in Bulgarian. It really is quite remarkable…

http://willbuckingham.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Will_Interview_Bulgaria.mp4

If you are not a Bulgarian speaker, then you can just watch my animated facial expressions and my extravagant gestures, and guess what I am saying. That is more or less what I did when I watched it again this morning…

Snapshots of Museum Experience – Elee Kirk

I’m really pleased to be able to announce that I’ve just received the contract from Routledge for Dr. Elee Kirk’s forthcoming book Snapshots of Museum Experience — a study of children’s experiences and photography in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. It will be published in their Routledge Research in Museum Studies series.

As many of you know, Elee was my long term partner and collaborator, and she died of breast cancer last August. Elee had planned to refashion her PhD thesis into a book herself, and we had worked together on a plan for the rewrite. As things with Elee’s illness developed far more quickly than we had hoped or anticipated, she didn’t get a chance to do the work herself. So I will be working on a rewrite in accord with the plan that Elee and I agreed together.

It will be an interesting and perhaps somewhat difficult writing challenge, working with somebody else’s book and somebody else’s voice. But if the final book won’t be quite the same book that Elee would have written, it is an nevertheless an honour to work on it. Elee’s research was so interesting, so well-informed, and so enjoyable to read about that I am delighted that it should be finding its way out into the world in book form. I hope that I do it justice.

Highbrow Philosophy!

I’m delighted to announce that my introductory philosophy course, “What Is Wisdom: An Introduction To Philosophy”, has just been launched over on Highbrow. It’s a ten-day email course which covers a whole range of philosophers — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Confucius, Zhuangzi and the Buddha. The course explores what the philosophers have said about what wisdom is or might be. Visit Highbrow’s website to find out more.

You may have looked at the names above and thought that there is a suspiciously high number of Persons With Beards on the list. This will be remedied in my next Highbrow course on Women Philosophers, which is currently work-in-progress. But when it comes out it will be guaranteed 100% beard-free.

The Rocket Dog is Launched!

Today is the official launch date for Lucy and the Rocket Dog.