Relative values

<p>From the Brontës to the Brothers Grimm, the Rosettis to Mary Wollestonecraft and Mary Shelley, there is a long tradition of writing families with remarkable creative talents. More recently there’s Kingsley and Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro and his acclaimed daughter Naomi, and the multi-talented Theroux family – and then we learned that Bernardine Evaristo’s husband, David Shannon, had been secretly writing his own novel and Zadie Smith’s mother Yvonne Bailey-Smith emerged with her own.</p>
Wednesday 27 October 2021 - 18:00 to 19:00

From the Brontës to the Brothers Grimm, the Rosettis to Mary Wollestonecraft and Mary Shelley, there is a long tradition of writing families with remarkable creative talents. More recently there’s Kingsley and Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro and his acclaimed daughter Naomi, and the multi-talented Theroux family – and then we learned that Bernardine Evaristo’s husband, David Shannon, had been secretly writing his own novel and Zadie Smith’s mother Yvonne Bailey-Smith emerged with her own.

So is the creative gene inherited or can it be learned? Can we answer the question of nature or nurture by looking at the lives of writers?

In the first of an occasional series, partnering with Rathbones Folio Prize, we will be interrogating this question with mother-and-daughter authors Deborah Moggach and Lottie Moggach. The event will be chaired by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, herself the daughter of a writer, and mother of another.