Simon Van Booy
Everything Beautiful Began After
Thurs, August 4, 2011. 7pm. £5/C£3

Note: This is a double author event with Molly Peacock

The first novel from the Frank O’Connor Award-winning author Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After is a beautifully rendered novel set against the backdrop of Athens – a story of love, tragedy and redemption amongst the ruins of Ancient Greece. To book your place, please use the form at the bottom of this page.

“If F. Scott Fitzgerald and Marguerite Duras had had a son, he would be Simon Van Booy; this is a truly special writer who does things with abstract language that is so evocative and original your breath literally catches in your chest. Everything Beautiful Began After is a powerful meditation on the undying nature of love and the often cruel beauty of one's own fate. This is a novel you simply must read!” – Andre Dubus III, author of Townie

Praise for Simon van Booy's short stories:
“Its combination of staccato sentences and tidy symbolism transforms the finest passages into little haikus of prose.” – The Daily Telegraph

“If they weren’t made of words, [Van Booy’s} stories would be made of lace and paper and ambergris; they’re so spindly, delicate and curiously perfumed. As it is, the words tend towards the aphoristic and nervily intense. Beautiful little things.” – Herald Scotland

“Stylistically breathtaking, tender and emotionally true without ever leaning on melodrama.” – Irish World

“It’s rare that reading, typically a solitary exercise, makes you feel so connected to other people.” – Time Out New York
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About Simon van Booy

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Simon Van Booy was born in London in 1975 and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. After playing football in Kentucky, he lived in Paris and Athens. In 2002 he was awarded an MFA by Dartington College of Arts and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Prize. He has been awarded the 2009 Frank O’Connor Award for his collection Love Begins in Winter (Beautiful Books, 2009). He is also the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love (Beautiful Books, 2010). He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his young daughter, where he teaches part-time at the School of Visual Arts and at Long Island University. He regularly writes for magazines and newspapers including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Daily Mail and The New York Times and The New York Post.

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Tickets
Fee £5
Concession £3*
* Unemployed, retired, student


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