English PEN Events next week: Zadie Smith and Azerbaijan demo

Zadie Smith- Changing My Mind

Tuesday 1 June, 6.30pm

Free Word Centre, London EC1R 3GA

£8/£5 members

How did George Eliot's love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? If Roland Barthes killed the Author, can Nabokov revive him? These are just some of the questions addressed by Zadie Smith in her recently published collection of essays, Changing My Mind. In this very special event, the highly acclaimed author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, will be reading and taking audience questions.

Novelist Zadie Smith was born in North London in 1975. She read English at Cambridge, graduating in 1997. Her acclaimed first novel, White Teeth (2000), won a number of awards and prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' and her third novel, On Beauty, was published in 2005, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Book online or by calling the English PEN office on 020 7324 2535.

Demonstration for Eynulla Fatullayev

Thursday 3 June, 12pm

The Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan, London, W8 5DL

On Thursday 3rd June English PEN, Amnesty International UK, ARTICLE 19 and Index on Censorship will be holding a demonstration outside the Azerbaijani embassy in London to call for the immediate release of Eynulla Fatullayev. Please join us!

English PEN's Honorary Member Azerbaijani newspaper editor Eynulla Fatullayev, 33, is currently serving an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence based on trumped up charges of terrorism and defamation. He was jailed in April 2007 after writing a series of articles critical of the authorities. For more details on Eynulla's case, please click here.

RSVP: For logistical reasons it would be helpful if we can estimate numbers likely to attend the demonstration - please email iar@amnesty.org.uk with "Azerbaijan demo [insert number] attending" in subject header to let us know if you - and any of your friends, family or colleagues - are planning to join us. Thank you.