Studio Session: Phillip Hoare : The Sea Inside Us

The sea surrounds us. It gives us life, provides us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. It is where we came from, and what we are made of; it represents home and migration, ceaseless change and constant presence. It covers two-thirds of our planet, yet caught up in our everyday lives; we seem to ignore it, and what it might mean. Drawing on his two most recent books, Leviathan or, The Whale and The Sea Inside, Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover a personal and metaphysical relationship with the sea, a search of the uncertain meeting of human and natural history, incarnate in the weighty, freighted shape of the whale.

Philip Hoare’s works include Wilde’s Last Stand, England’s Lost Eden, and Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Leviathan or, The Whale won the Samuel Johnson Prize for 2009. The Sea Inside, his latest book, was published in 2013 and acclaimed as ‘A profound and lyrical love affair’ by the Observer, ‘A collage of memoir, cultural history and travelogue…glorious stuff’ by the Guardian and as ‘A magnificent book by the Financial Times. He is professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton, and co-curator, with Angela Cockayne, of the Moby-Dick Big Read: www.mobydickbigread.com

Studio Sessions are staged as part of the affiliation between the ICA and Kingston University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, and the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy.