ALDOUS HUXLEY AND BRAVE NEW WORLD
with Nicholas Murray

Wednesday 20th March 2019
Doors open at 6:30 pm, Talk commences at 7:00 pm 

The Century Club
61-63 Shaftesbury Ave.
Soho, London W1D 6LQ

Like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian satire Brave New World remains one of the most frequently discussed 20th century novels of an imagined future - and is now generally regarded as the more prescient of the two. Join Huxley's biographer Nicholas Murray to uncover the stories behind the writing of the book and of of an extraordinary polymath, writer satirist, psychedelic experimenter, mystic and intellectual.
Nicholas will talk about how Brave New World came about and what Huxley was trying to say about contemporary society and the direction in which it was heading.
The dystopian novel is always as much about the moment it was written as the future it seems to be trying to predict and although Huxley’s world of the 1930s may seem superficially remote from today’s concerns his analysis of the operations of a soft power that makes us in his words ‘love our slavery', consumer manipulation, the commodification of leisure, and the threat to individual liberty from many directions, including authoritarian populism, has many present day echoes. 
 
NICHOLAS MURRAY is a mulit-award winning poet, academic and the author of many books including literary biographies of Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Bruce Chatwin, Andrew Marvell and Matthew ArnoldHe is based in Bloomsbury and the Welsh Marches, runs the poetry imprint, Rack Press, and writes the Bibiophilicblogger literary blog.