The award-winning novelist moves, with detours through visual art, sport and cinema, from Beckett to DeLillo, in search of writing’s elusive, perhaps even non-existent, ‘pure act’.

Could the writer be thought as the sports commentator’s double, feeding us colourful and animated accounts of unfolding events? Or, as perennial creator of symbolic violence and catastrophe, is it in the terrorist that the writer finds their shady modern counterpart? What does Auden mean when he claims that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’?

Introduced by Adam Thirlwell, novelist and London Editor of the Paris Review.

Tom McCarthy is an artist and one of the most original and stimulating writers of contemporary fiction and non-fiction. His new collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish gathers essays that have appeared over the last decade in publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s and Artforum, with themes ranging from Franz Kafka and James Joyce to David Lynch and Sonic Youth.

His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, Remainder, which deals with questions of trauma and repetition, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and was recently adapted for the cinema. His third, C, which explores the relationship between melancholia and technological media, was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015.