Listed in the Financial Times‘ mid-year best fiction in translation, Lucie Paye‘s remarkable debut novel Absence delves into the artistic process. While a painter battling against the blank canvas sees a mysterious female figure emerge under his brushes, a dying woman writes to her long-lost son.

Joined by Michèle Roberts, whose latest novel Cut Out focuses on the young women assisting Matisse in the making of his famous cut-outs, Lucie Paye and her translator Natasha Lehrer, will discuss art as creation and destruction, the creative role of the unconscious, the power of love against loss and translation as a revelatory process.

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