Housmans are very excited to welcome the celebrated writer, philosopher, and visual artist, Eva Meijer to the shop to launch
her novel Sea Now, newly translated into English by Anne Thompson Melo.
This work is a profound meditation on the relationship between the human and non-human and a biting satire of governmental ineptitude in the face of climate change. As the sea swallows a nation, the prime minister holds a daily press conference and scientists try to find an explanation, without success. A climate activist, a young poet, and an oceanographer journey across the new sea and return to confront all that has been lost, as a coming-of-age adventure story is braided with a clarion call to wake up to the defining challenge of our age.
Eva will be joined in conversation by the poet and academic Lucy Mercer, author of Emblem (Prototype, 2022) and Afterlife (forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions.) The two will talk for around 45 minutes- 1 hour followed by an open discussion.
Eva Meijer is a philosopher, visual artist, writer and singer- songwriter. Their fiction and non-fiction has been translated into over twenty languages. Since the publication of their first novel in 2011, their works have received numerous awards, including the Halewijnprijs honouring their oeuvre. Meijer’s books have been met enthusiastically by the Dutch but also international press including reviews in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and New York Review of Books.
Lucy Mercer is a London-based writer. She is the author of the poetry book Emblem (Prototype, 2022) which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and a book of the year in Frieze, The New Statesman and The White Review. She is currently writing Afterlife, a nonfiction essay on wax and mortality which was awarded the 2024 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize and is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, where she has worked with the Poetry Society, Natural England, National Trust and BookTrust to deliver creative community-based projects that focus on biodiversity. Her research interests and projects are situated across ecology, visual cultures, literary production, critical poetics and material histories.
As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please choose the ‘unwaged’ option.
If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.
Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00