Alongside Damian Grant and Andrew O’Hagan, biographer Rachel Holmes was one of the chairs for this year's British Council Cambridge Seminar. Here Rachel talks about the significance of the seminar both in terms of her own, the delegates' and the participating writers' responses to the event, and also its importance in cultural and critical terms.

This was a landmark year for the Cambridge Seminar, held as usual at Downing College, Cambridge. The opening session by Jeanette Winterson was the first time since the seminar’s inception that both author and presiding chair were women. Winterson was the queen who stole the most hearts at this year’s seminar. Her passionate, glittering and challenging contribution earned her the laurels as favourite author among the delegates.

2003 also placed a critical – in the literary sense – landmark in the topography of contemporary writing from the UK. Over the course of the intense and challenging seven-day seminar, it became strikingly clear that there are broadly two cultures co-existing under the portmanteau term ‘British literature’.  

Of course, as in other cultural spheres, there always have been dominant, emergent and residual movements in the literary arts. But a week spent drinking – metaphorically and literally – at the intellectual oasis at Downing College was to experience, in dynamic action, a new generation of writers who have definitively pushed their literary work beyond the imaginative boundaries of the once useful but now largely defunct critical frameworks of the late-twentieth century.

There is a new dispensation, and writers such as Ali Smith, Andrew O’Hagan, Zadie Smith, Toby Litt, Kamila Shamsie, and Helon Habila are already defining these new formations of literary style and consciousness. To these writers, post-modernism, post-coloniality (as well as the counter-cultural charges of political correctness complained of by their detractors) are archaeological terms describing literary history rather than its active present. The tradition these writers have chosen to inherit is that which used to be considered 'writing from the margins'.

For this group of emerging writers, the old margins are now the central canon, the centre has been displaced by a new global literary geography, and the old staging-posts of literary criticism (post-colonial, post-structuralist, post-modern etc) are residual critical tools that have been superseded, as they should be, by new literatures and creative voices that can no longer be explained by them.

Isobel Dixon, Nick Laird, and Ian Bamforth gave some subtle new shapes to poetic consciousness, and a linguistic jam session with the legendary Tom Raworth will be one of my most cherished memories of the conference.

The possibility of unexpected illness, train delays and no-shows among speakers are the perennial anxiety of conference chairs and organisers. Perhaps we should worry less. Terry Eagleton, unable to attend due to a slipped disc, nevertheless impressed one delegate sufficiently to gain his vote for best presentation of the week. Rallying at less than a minute's notice, Andrew O’Hagan gave such a virtuoso introduction to the work, life and career of Tariq Ali (also unable to attend) that the spellbound delegates urged him to continue for the full session, by the end of which I for one was convinced that by some process of metempsychosis between absent author and present chair, O’Hagan had become more Tariq Ali than Tariq Ali.

Political, artistic and ideological differences were communicated throughout the week by courteous but forceful comparison rather than outright confrontation, though there was some enjoyable and productive dissonance. A panel lamenting the death of the ‘common reader’ and the metaphysical demise of twentieth-century high modernism came across as anachronistic and quaintly insular by comparison with Kamila Shamsie’s multi-culti-transglobal recollection of her first reading of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and her imaginative understanding of the diverse, discordant, localised and distinctly uncommon expectations of modern readers. Helon Habila’s story of the difficulty of finding in Nigeria a publisher for his Caine Prize-winning Waiting for an Angel cast a different perspective on complaints from some UK publishers about the publicity-driven market forces of the resource-rich world of UK publishing and media. The arrangement of the seminar demonstrated by example, leaving delegates to draw their own analysis of the current state of play in British letters. As the week progressed, many delegates began to debate and shape their analysis of the two-cultures phenomenon.  

The unalloyed joy of delegates discovering for the first time writers whose work they had never previously encountered gave rise to a number of defining themes of the week, particularly an ongoing knowledge-sharing and debate about translation. The possibilities and constraints of translation (ranging from stylistic questions on the translatability of flamingos and mangos, to brass-tacks analysis of the commercial pressures on professional translation) emerged as a dominant theme of the seminar. On a practical note, several translators and publishers left the seminar with undertakings to get their newly-discovered authors into translation.

For a memorable instance of literary love at first sight, none could surpass the kinetic exchange that passed between the brilliant but generally reluctant-to-perform-in-public Jenny Diski and a charming, usually reticent delegate who raised his hand to say, with great emotional intensity, that although he had not known of Diski’s work until that day, her reading was the finest non-fiction prose he had ever heard, and explained why. At this, Jenny Diski turned to her chair Andrew O’Hagan and asked him if she might now be excused to go home and ‘commit suicide', so she could die blissfully happy having just experienced 'the most perfect praise from a new reader'.

The 2003 Cambridge Seminar on UK literature impressed deeply on me how vital, and fragile, are these spaces of publicly-funded cultural exchange, where the new can find a voice to develop critical reach and authority, and from which new interpretative tools can emerge from practical and informed dialogue. As literary works and their rapidly changing communities of readers take on new and more inclusive forms – expanding here, decreasing there – our modes of engagement for contemplating, sharing and showcasing this literary culture must inevitably change. At the heart of the seminar experience remains a dynamically transferable relationship between talented writers, informed chairs and – most importantly – those intelligent, questing and challenging readers – the delegates who are the energy, stimulant and lifeblood of every successful literary event.  

Much of the credit for the success and smooth running of this year’s seminar goes to the forceful talents, subtle arts and plain hard work of the organising team led by Margaret Meyer and her class act team from the British Council Literature and Film Department, along with the imperturbable Event Manager Alison St Clair Ford and Event Director David Steven.

And as for me? Chairing is the art of vanishing mediation. Provide comfort, support and plenty of water (before session) and wine (after, usually), don’t crack better jokes than the contributor, and, like every chair, at all times be ready to be sat upon or overturned. My single greatest disappointment was that when the week reached its conclusion with the traditional last night revue of high-spirited poetry, song, recitation, party tricks, readings and a hilarious comic spoof of a typical 2003 Cambridge Seminar session, I was not deemed worthy of caricature. It would have been an honour to be lampooned by such a fine group of delegates, most of whom, by the end of the week, had forged a new network that has been active ever since.

Rachel Holmes’s first book, Scanty Particulars: The Mysterious, Astonishing Life of Victorian Surgeon James Barry, was published to great critical acclaim. She is now writing her second book, Sarah Baartman: the Hottentot Venus.