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• 16 March 2012
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  • University features at Charleston Festival
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University features at Charleston Festival

The University of Sussex is to feature in two major events at the annual Charleston Festival this summer (25 May-3 June).

Expect a memorable meeting of minds on Thursday 31 May, when Sussex graduate and prize-winning writer Ian McEwan will be in conversation with the distinguished historian Lord (Asa) Briggs.

Before his academic career, which encompassed the Vice-Chancellorship of the University of Sussex (1967-76), Lord Briggs was a cryptographer during the Second World War. He worked at Bletchley Park alongside code-breaker Alan Turing, deciphering messages from the German army’s Enigma machines.

Ian McEwan, who studied English at Sussex from 1967-70, has a long-standing fascination with code-breaking and subterfuge. His play, The Imitation Game, dramatises these interests.

You can go right back to the 19^th century on Sunday 3 June, when the University of Sussex Vice-Chancellor, Professor Michael Farthing, will be chairing a discussion with biographer Claire Tomalin. Her acclaimed study of the life and work of Charles Dickens was published to mark the 200^th anniversary this year of the novelist’s birth.

Tickets for both events cost £13. For more information and to book festival events, see the Charleston Festival website.

Charleston, near Firle in East Sussex, was the 20^th-century home of artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and a country meeting place for the writers, painters and thinkers known as the Bloomsbury Group. It is now a small museum and holds an annual literary festival, now in its 23rd year.