ICI London and Fitzcarraldo Editions present the forthcoming books by Italian author Thea Lenarduzzi and Clare Carlisle, both published in September 2025.
Join Thea Lenarduzzi, author of The Tower, and Clare Carlisle, author of Transcendence for Beginners, in conversation with biographer and critic Frances Wilson.
In her new book, The Tower, Thea Lenarduzzi, fascinated by the story of a young woman locked in a tower, attempts to piece the past together in a formidable act of imagination, which, tugging at the strings of the how, why and who of stories, begins to unravel the very idea of storytelling itself. In Transcendence for Beginners the author, Clare Carlisle, informed by her experience as a biographer of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot as well as her own life, asks what one human existence can reveal and how writing can transmit its truth.
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Thea Lenarduzzi is a writer, broadcaster and editor. Her debut, Dandelions, a family memoir and cultural history of migration between Italy and England, won the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and was shortlisted for the Ackerley Prize for ‘literary autobiography of outstanding merit’. Her biography of Natalia Ginzburg, Collapsing Houses: Pieces of Natalia Ginzburg, is forthcoming.
Clare Carlisle is the author of eight books on philosophy and philosophers, including Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard and The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, which won the 2024 PEN Prize for Biography. Clare grew up in Manchester, studied philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, and now lives in Hackney. She is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London.
Frances Wilson is a biographer and critic. Her most recent book, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize.