Guest author Vanora Bennett to speak about 'Russian obsession'

Vanora Bennett will give a talk on February 23rd

Russia and Putin have been looming large on the TV news and in the press of late. Is she friend or foe, a danger to the West or misunderstood?

Next month the Friends of Molesey Library offers you an opportunity to delve a little deeper into the Russian psyche by accepting our invitation to attend our latest Meet the Author event. It’s on Tuesday February 23^rd at 7.30pm and will be with Vanora Bennett, a writer with considerable first-hand experience and who admits to having ‘an obsession with Russia’.

Vanora started her career as a journalist, working in Paris, Cambodia, and parts of Africa and finally landing in the country which stopped being the Soviet Union three months after she arrived. She spent much of the early 1990s in smoky taxis in the Caucasus mountains, covering a series of small post-Soviet conflicts that built up to the war in Chechnya. As an afterthought, she started writing books. She now has eight books to her name, including two novels set in Russia or about Russians - The White Russian and Midnight in St Petersburg. She has also written two works of non-fiction about Russia - Crying Wolf, about the start of the post-Soviet war in Chechnya, and The Taste of Dreams: An Obsession with Russia and Caviar, which is a travelogue through the wilder parts of newly capitalist Russia in the 1990s.

Vanora will speak about the fate of Russia’s White Emigrés after the 1917 Revolution in a talk entitled Down & Out in Paris & London, and will take your questions about her work and what lessons we can learn in today’s world.  Signed copies of her books will be available to purchase on the night.

Tickets cost £5 – which includes a glass of wine or soft drink – and they can be purchased at Molesey Library. Alternatively, you can send a cheque (made payable to Friends of Molesey Library) with a stamped addressed envelope, to Author Event, Molesey Library, The Forum, Walton Road, West Molesey KT8 2HZ.