Event Details

Professor of Graphic Writing Mary Talbot and graphic artist Bryan Talbot launch their new book, Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington

Please join us for the launch of Mary and Bryan Talbot's new graphic biography, Armed With Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington.

Reluctant muse and feminist champion… society heiress and rebel refugee… the last of the Surrealists: Leonora Carrington played many roles in her long and extraordinary life. Renouncing her privileged upbringing in pre-war England for the more exciting elite of Paris’s 1930s avant-garde, she comes to rub shoulders (and more) with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, after embarking on a complicated love affair with Max Ernst. But the demons that have both haunted and inspired her work are gathering, and when the world goes mad with the outbreak of war and the Nazi invasion, Leonora’s own hold on reality collapses into a terrifying psychotic episode of her own. Eventually fleeing war-torn Europe, she emerges into a new and richly creative life in Mexico City, establishing herself as a prodigious painter, writer, and advocate of women’s rights. This new work by the acclaimed partnership of Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot celebrates the life and career of a truly remarkable woman – and artist.

Professor Mary Talbot is an internationally acclaimed graphic novelist. Her first, Dotter of her Father's Eyes (with Bryan Talbot), won the 2012 Costa Biography Award. Other graphic works include Sally Heathcote, Suffragette (2014), The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia (2016) and Rain (2019). Her academic writing includes numerous books, including Fiction at Work: Language and Social Practice in Fiction (1995), Media Discourse: Representation and Interaction (2007) and Language and Gender (3rd ed, 2019). Professor Talbot is one of the three founder patrons of the Lakes International Comic Art Festival.

Mary and Bryan Talbot will talk about their work in conversation with Dr Brian Baker, followed by an informal drinks reception.