Join us to hear Joanna speak with Hannah Trevarthen about her latest work, described as, ‘a genre-defying work of memoir, blending reportage, environmental writing and literary criticism.’
In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, now in her 50s, she
undertakes the same journey, revisiting the same cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers – Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and
Irma Kurtz – who chronicled their own road trips across the US. In Greyhound, Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual with the communal, and the
privatization of public space as she navigates two very different landscapes – an earlier, less atomized America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink
of environmental catastrophe. Her focus is on the built-upon environment: the rivers of tarmac, the illuminated gas stations, the sprawling suburbs and the sites of extraction
created specifically to fuel contemporary life. Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror and complexity.
Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, Guardian US and she is a contributing editor at the Dark Mountain project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender and in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation’s Environmental Writing Fellowship. Greyhound is her second book.
Hannah is the Director of Nottingham City of Literature and the UNESCO Creative Cities of Literature Network Lead. Prior to this, she worked at English PEN, one of the world’s oldest human rights organisations,and she led Common Currency, English PEN’s centenary celebration, an international multi-partner project funded by Arts Council England.