Joanna Walsh at Blackwell’s

We are excited that Joanna Walsh is heading to Blackwell’s bookshop to read from her new book, Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters, and chat about it with Kaye Mitchell in this event in partnership with the Centre for New Writing.

Here’s the book blurb: “Amateurs! is the story of how YOU created internet culture and why it matters. Web 2.0 invited users to create: blogs, vlogs, tweets, memes and more. For the first time in history, art became *the* fundamental form of communication. What started as fun became a currency – vital for finding friends, work and love – then, as meatspace job security eroded, work. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge for use, selling our creations back to us. Whatever we’re making online, it isn’t amateur any more. If creative acts online have facilitated AI’s environmental impact, alt-right politics, neoliberal economics, they are also at the heart of effective activism, community-building, political solidarities. What we make online is political, not only in content but because it’s here in this public forum, because so much of it comes from people who never had a voice in any public forum before. An aesthetic revolution as big as modernism, internet amateurism has changed how we think, talk about and see our world. It asks us to re-evaluate not only what art, and what an artist is, but the divide between the amateur and professional itself.”

Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance, and the author of seven books, including Hotel, described by Deborah Levy as “a dazzling tour de force of embodied ideas”. Other books are Vertigo, Worlds from the Word’s End and Break*up. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. She also works as a critic, editor, teacher and arts activist. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers” and currently runs @noentry_arts.

Kaye Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for New Writing at University of Manchester. She is also a literary and cultural critic with particular interests in modern and contemporary literature, literary theory, gender and sexuality studies, and experimental writing by women. She has published books on literary intention (Intention and Text, Continuum, 2008) and contemporary literature (A.L. Kennedy, Palgrave, 2007; Sarah Waters, ed. collection with Bloomsbury, 2013).

Doors are at 6.30pm, with the event starting at 6.45pm. Tickets are £4, with admission free when purchasing a copy the book.