The Tolkien Society’s Annual Guest Speaker will speaking online tonight via Zoom, Facebook and YouTube.
We’re pleased to announce Una McCormack as our annual Guest of Honour. Usually our Guest follows the post-AGM Annual Dinner, and is one of the most prestigious positions within the Tolkien Society’s annual calendar. Our Guests of Honour always do a talk, Q&A session, or, as is often the case with artists, a presentation. Previous guests include Christopher Tolkien, Brian Sibley, Priscilla Tolkien, John Garth, Alan Lee, Dimitra Fimi, Tom Shippey and Humphrey Carpenter. The format and the topic is of the speaker’s choosing, but our desire is to share some aspect of current thinking on Tolkien.
We cannot hold our AGM or Annual Dinner this year in person, so we are holding this online and open to the world.
This year’s speaker is Una McCormack. Dr Una McCormack is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling science fiction author. Her most recent novel, The Last Best Hope, is based on the show Star Trek: Picard. Her academic interests include women’s science fiction, transformative works (‘fanfiction’), which all come together in her academic and creative writing on fanfiction based on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
She will be speaking to us on the topic of “Our Secret Vice: fanfiction as a creative-critical response to the worlds and works of Tolkien“, and Society members can access this via Zoom, and the general public will be able to watch this via our Facebook page and YouTube channels. The talk begins at 19.00 (UK-time, UTC) on Saturday 18th April 2020.
