Marie Darrieussecq - Pig Tales, 30th anniversary | Wednesday 11 March, 7.30pm

Join us for a very special evening with celebrated French author Marie Darrieussecq discussing the monster figures that haunt our literary landscapes and lives - marking the 30th anniversary of her (in)famous novel Pig Tales and new translation into French of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

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First published in 1996, Pig Tales is a brilliant satirical novel about a stunning young woman working in a beauty ‘massage’ parlour. She enjoys extraordinary success at bringing home the bacon (in part due to her increasingly rosy and irresistible backside) until she slowly metamorphoses – into a pig. Rejected by her boyfriend, left to wander the sewers and forage for food in public parks, she takes up with a werewolf with insatiable appetites. They share everything (pizza is a particular favourite; she gets the pizza, he gets the delivery boy) until someone alerts the authorities and tragedy strikes...

Gender, politics and social hypocrisy all come under scrutiny in this entertaining and enlightening novel - a dark fable of political and sexual corruption that gave us renewed debates on gendered differences, difficult self-acceptance, and the social norms constricting women's bodies and their professional status.

In this conversation with Marie-Claire Barnet, who works on literature and visual culture at Durham University, Marie Darrieussecq will also talk about her work as a translator and her latest work on another hybrid creature - the enduringly fascinating Frankenstein:

"Mary Shelley reminds us that evil is not the root of monstrosity but the absence: lack of love, affection, decency." - Marie Darrieussecq