Damian’s Barr’s highly successful Shoreditch House Literary Salon will be taking place overseas for the first time: in Moscow on the 2 December!

Damian Barr brings his celebrated Literary Salon from London to Moscow and invites leading British and Russian writers to share their personal and literary tales of cities real and imagined.  See Moscow and London as you’ve never seen them before.  

Hosted by Damian Barr, the Salon in Moscow will feature novelist, writer and columnist Sam Leith; Random House Digital Editor Dan Franklin; writer, poet, essayist, journalist, translator and artist Linor Goralik; and writer and poet Alexander Ilichevsky, who won the Russian Booker Prize in 2007.

" Tales of the Cities: Real and Imagined"

Cities exist on maps and in minds—some exist in both.  They are made of bricks and buildings but also of people and stories.  They are rarely utopic or dystopic but instead involve traffic jams and cinema tickets and drinks with friends and late-night trysts and early morning awkwardness.  Cities also exist in time—would Dickens get served in a Soho bar today?  Not if his pocket had already been picked by a contemporary Oliver.   Would Pushkin feel at home in Moscow now?   

When: 2 December, 18.00-20.00

Where: Cvet Nochi Bar (12/2 Bolshoy Kozikhinsky, Metro Pushkinskaya)

To gain your FREE ENTRY, please, register HERE

Damian Barr has been an award-winning journalist for 10 years and written for The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Evening Standard, Esquire, Harpers and GQ.  He has also co-written two plays for BBC Radio 4 and is currently writing his second book for Bloomsbury.   His Literary Salons are irreverent and as entertaining as they are informative.

Past guests include Diana Athill, Gary Shteyngart, David Nicholls, Helen Fielding, David Mitchell and James Frey.  He also spends a few weeks of each year living in hotels reading stories aloud to guests as a sort of literary call boy. Generally he prefers gin to vodka so expects Moscow to be a challenge.

Sam Leith is a freelance writer and critic. A former Literary Editor of the Daily Telegraph, he now writes regularly for the Evening Standard, Guardian, Spectator, Wall Street Journal Europe and Prospect. Sam’s non-fiction books Dead Pets and Sod’s Law were published in the UK to critical acclaim, and in 2011 Bloomsbury published his first novel "The Coincidence Engine" to rave reviews. "The Coincidence Engine" was described by Michael Moorcock as ‘Philip K. Dick meets Evelyn Waugh in a fast-paced satire... I loved its twists and turns’.

In October 2011, "The Coincidence Engine" was followed with a further non-fiction book which has already appeared in the Amazon bestseller charts and been acclaimed in the British press. "You Talkin’ To Me?: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama" is a witty, elegant exploration of the art of persuasion.

Dan Franklin Dan Franklin is Digital Editor at The Random House Group UK, where he is involved primarily in its ‘direct-to-digital’ publishing and cross-group initiatives including commissioning the Brain Shots: Summer of Unrest series, launching the short stories series Storycuts, collaborating with Failbetter Games on an interactive narrative website for THE NIGHT CIRCUS by Erin Morgenstern, and working on projects for a range of authors including the Richard Dawkins ‘Magic of Reality’ iPad app.

He previously held the same title at indie publisher Canongate, where he worked on such projects as Nick Cave’s Bunny Munro app, Simon’s Cat for the PSP, and the ground-breaking iPad publication Why The Net Matters by David Eagleman.

Linor Goralik was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1975. Immigrated to Israel in 1989, moved to Moscow in 2001. As a writer, published a number of prose books (including No (a novel co-authored by Sergey Kuznetsov), 2004, ...And Said:, 2004, Half of the Sky (co-authored by Stanislav Lvovsky), 2004, Not Children's Food, 2007, Long Story Short, 2009, and others. As a poet, published a number of poetry collections including Non-Locals, 2003 and Catch Them, Piter, 2007.

Other poetry and prose collections were published by Novyj Mir, Vozduh, .txt and other periodicals. As a children's writer, authored Agatha Returns Home, 2009, and Martin Never Cries, 2007.

Alexander Ilichevsky (born on 25 November 1970, Sumgait, Azerbaijan) ― writer and poet, winner of Russian Booker Prize 2007, author of nine books of prose (novels "Mathematics", "Persian", "Matisse", "Ai-Petri", "Nebozem na kolese", "Solara", collection of stories "The Swimmer", collection of essays "Rain for Danae", collection of short-stories "Donkey's Jaw") and three books of poetry ("Incidents", "Non-Vision", "Volga of Honey and Glass"). Alexander Ilichevsky graduated in 1993 from Moscow Physics and Technology Institute.

In 1993-1999 worked as a scientist in Israel and USA. Since 2000 has been lived in Moscow. Recent employments: Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Corporation, Lechaim Magazine.