FEATURING:

• Six spectacular films
• Expert panels, talks and Q&A on: digital privacy artificial intelligence dystopian fiction
• Digital dystopian performance using binaural and virtual reality technology
• Installations from some of Hull’s digital pioneers

The acclaimed dystopian novelists Louise Welsh and Martin Goodman join Gregory Claeys, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on utopian and dystopian fiction, in a Q&A discussion of contemporary dystopias. Is George Orwell’s 1984 still relevant to our present digital age of constant connectivity?  Are we being dominated by Big Brother, or is this a world of lots of Little Brothers, where we all watch each other?  Join us for a discussion of how you think science fiction can help us to make sense of our increasingly technological age.

Louise Welsh is a high-acclaimed novelist and short story writer. She began her literary career writing crime fiction, and her debut novel, The Cutting Room (2002), was nominated for several literary awards including the Orange Prize for Fiction. More recently Welsh has turned her attention to the dystopian genre. Her “Plague Times” trilogy takes place in a post-apocalyptic Britain suffering in the wake of a deadly pandemic virus.

Martin Goodman works across fiction and nonfiction. His first novel, On Bended Knees, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize (now the Costa). Today Goodman is the director of the Philip Larkin Centre at Hull University and continues to write critically acclaimed fiction. His most recent novel, Ectopia, is a modern teenage dystopia that was heralded as “a new dawn for British writing” upon its release.

Gregory Claeys in Professor of Political Thought at Royal Holloway University.  Author of Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, he is one of the world’s foremost experts on utopian and dystopian fiction.  His most recent book, Dystopia: A Natural History, is a history of dystopian fiction and thought.

Annie Machon worked for MI5 during the 1990s as a counter-terrorism officer with a focus on the activities of the IRA.  In 1996 she resigned from the Security Service and blew the whistle on a series of alleged crimes that she claimed to have witnessed during her time in the intelligence services.  She then went into hiding with her partner, David Shayler, and the two fled across Europe to escape prosecution before spending two years in exile in Paris.

Now she works as a journalist and prominent campaigner.  In 2013 she was appointed Chair of the Courage Foundation, an organisation that fights for the protection of whistleblowers and has campaigned for such high-profile figures as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Lauri Love.  She resigned from the Courage Foundation a year later and today works as the European Director of the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organisation of current and former law enforcement agents and government officials who oppose the War on Drugs.