Chairperson: Jean-Philippe Imbert

As a teenager growing up in Chicago, Edmund White’s dream was to become a writer, to move to New York and Paris, and to “know everybody”. Few people have achieved their dreams so fully. Since his first novel, Forgetting Elena, was championed by Nabokov, White has been celebrated as a prose writer of rare style and observational powers, and a man with a talent for living. A novelist, essayist, biographer and “archaeologist of gossip”, he has published some 29 books, including pioneering bestseller The Joy of Gay Sex, biographies of Genet and Proust, and A Boy’s Own Story, the novel that shot him to fame. He has met and befriended a wealth of famous writers, many of whom found their way into his work, to sometimes controversial effect. Already the author of two highly praised memoirs, White comes to Dublin with Inside a Pearl, an account of his sixteen heady years in Paris, when he met everyone from Raymond Carver to Yves St Laurent, and fell in love with Parisian life. White was recently described by The Irish Times as “the world’s most entertaining supper guest”, and in the company of Jean-Philippe Imbert, his mischievous wit and scrupulous honesty promises an evening to remember.