Graham Caveney: In Conversation (with Will Rees)

Graham Caveney is the author of three fascinating, hilarious, horrifying and strangely uplifting memoirs: ‘The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness’, which tells the fragmented, difficult story of his working-class adolescence in the North of England suffused with the trauma of abuse by a Catholic priest, mentor and headmaster. ‘On Agoraphobia’, his essay-memoir on living with a debilitating condition of spatial anxiety that blends personal experience with the researched accounts of related examples of struggle, from Franz Kafka to Anne Tyler. And most recently, ‘The Body in the Library: Memoir of a Diagnosis’, his defiant account of living, loving and reading with a terminal cancer diagnosis. He has written critically acclaimed monographs on William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, as well as a plethora of literary music journalism for a variety of publications includingThe Face,Q,The Guardian,The Independent,Arena and GQ.

Caveneys’ autobiographical writings perform that most difficult feat of conveying the weight and seriousness of distressing experiences with the greatest possible lightness, humor and grace. At all times he entangles the personal within the wider context of the culture that surrounds him, from his vivid chronicling of Northern working class life during the 1980s to the manifold accounts of his passionate, burning encounters with music and above all literature throughout his lifetime.

Caveney will be in conversation with the editor and publisher Will Rees, founder of the magnificent Peninsula Press and author of thefree-wheeling philosophical essay ‘Hypochondria’, an exercise in exploring ‘the causes – and the costs – of our desire for certainty’ with a structural blend of research and anecdote.