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EA Festival and Gainsborough’s House will welcome renowned journalist and memoirist, Lynn Barber, to Gainsborough’s House for a fireside chat with her agent and publisher, Clare Conville. The occasion of her talk is the publication of A Little Art Education, her newest book of interviews featuring some of Britain’s leading artists, e.g., Grayson Perry, Phyllidow Barlow, Lucian Freud, David Hockey, Maggi Hambling, Tracey Emin. It should come as no surprise that the book’s subjects possess personalities as outsized and vivid as their artworks. But then again, Lynn is one of the best interviewers of all time.
‘For my money, Barber … is by some distance the best interviewer to have worked on Fleet Street.’
John Maier, The Times, Saturday Review
‘Feuds and gossip are the making of any gathering, and A Little Art Education is not a book of art criticism.’
Lisa Hilton, The Spectator
About Lynn Barber
Lynn Barber was born in 1944, and studied English at the University of Oxford. She began her career in journalism at Penthouse, and progressed to the Independent on Sunday, the Observer, the Telegraph, and the Sunday Times, as well as Vanity Fair. She has won six British Press Awards and published two volumes of her celebrated interviews, Mostly Men (1991) and Demon Barber (1998).
An Education (2010), Lynn’s memoir about her schoolgirl affair with a con man, was made into an Oscar-nominated film of the same title in 2010, with a screenplay by Nick Hornby, starring Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard.
A Curious Career, published in May 2014, continued the story of her life as a journalist and interviewer.
A Little Art Education documents her fascination with art and artists.
About A Little Art Education
Despite failing O-Level Art, and with a self-proclaimed lack of skill and knowledge of the subject, Lynn has devoted much of her illustrious career to observing art and the people who make it. From the trials and tribulations of being a juror for the 2006 Turner Prize to dining at the Hotel Meurice with Salvador Dalí’s ocelot, and her enduring friendships with David Hockney and Tracey Emin, this beautifully illustrated book documents Lynn’s unusual and inspiring journey from curious outsider to finding her place among some of the most admired artists of the last hundred years.
