Heart of Conrad

Joseph Conrad in Contemporary Culture. Friday 7 November 19.00

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Pigott Theatre, British Library, London

Joseph Conrad is considered one of the greatest writers in the English language, which was not even his native tongue. Just over a century after his death the Polish-British novelist remains deeply relevant and widespread, across different cultures and art forms. Join us for an evening exploring this wide-ranging legacy, bringing together an expert panel of academics, writers and a film maker.

The discussion is introduced by Robert Hampson of the Joseph Conrad Society, and the panel draws together the international expertise of Professor Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pośpiech; Professor Kaoru Yamamoto, film maker Robert Lemkin and science fiction superstar Jacek Dukaj in conversation with the BBC’s Kasia Madera.

Arrive early for a special screening of African Apocalypse, directed by Robert Lemkin and inspired by Joseph Conrad. Information and tickets here.

• Robert Hampson is Professor Emeritus at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the Chair of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK) and author of four critical monographs on Conrad: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (Basingstoke: Macmillan / New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992); Cross-Cultural Encounters in Conrad’s Malay Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave: 2000); Conrad’s Secrets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Joseph Conrad, Cosmopolitanism and Transnationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). He has also published a critical biography, Joseph Conrad (Reaktion Books, 2020) as well as editing a range of works by Conrad.
• Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pośpiech is a professor at University of Silesia, Poland and President of the Joseph Conrad Society, Poland. She has published five books on modernism, translation and adaptation studies (most recently Adaptations of J. Conrad’s Life and Works in Contemporary Culture, 2022) and numerous articles on Conrad, Harold Pinter, William Golding, Jatinder Verma, T.S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw. Her latest book is The Resonance of Joseph Conrad in Contemporary Culture out now from Berghahn Books.
• Kaoru Yamamoto is Associate Professor at the University of Shiga Prefecture in Japan. She is the author of Rethinking Joseph Conrad’s Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity (Bloomsbury, 2017). She also translated into Japanese Conrad’s The Rover (1923, out in Japanese in 2022) and the new biography, Joseph Conrad (Reaction, 2020) by Robert Hampson (2024). She is now working on a translation of Conrad’s Nostromo.
• Jacek Dukaj published his first story at the age of 16 and has gone on to publish numerous novels, novellas, short stories, and essays. His works have been translated into nineteen languages. A short animated movie by Tomasz Baginski based on his novella ‘Katedra’ (‘The Cathedral’) was nominated for an Academy Award in 2003. The Netflix series Into the Night was based on his novel Starość aksolotla (The Old Axolotl). Dukaj has won a European Literary Award and a Kościelski Award. He lives in Krakow. His Ice, translated by Ursula Phillips, is out from Head of Zeus.Dukaj studied philosophy at the Jagiellonian University. He is known for the complexity of his books, and it has often been said that a single short story by Dukaj contains more ideas than many writers put into all their books in their lifetime. The themes frequent in his works include technological singularity, philosophy of history, limits of language and humanity, and thus his books can often be classified as hard science fiction. Dukaj’s books bear some resemblance to Neal Stephenson’s writing, however his stylistic brio makes him as much a ‘literary’ as a ‘hard science fiction’ writer – allowing comparisons with books by Thomas Pynchon or David Mitchell. His essays touch on subjects like ‘engineering the meaning of life’, ‘art in the age of artificial intelligence’, consequences of shift to non-symbolic communication and thought, relationships between values and technology – drawing frequent comparisons to work of Yuval Noah Harari.His books and short stories have been translated into 19 languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian and Albanian.
• Director Rob Lemkin is a documentary film maker, author of over 50 films for television, cinema and gallery settings. His award-winning African Apocalypse (2020), a non-fiction retelling of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness focuses on colonial conquest of Niger. Enemies of the People (2009), about the Killing Fields of Cambodia, won over thirty awards including the Sundance Jury Prize, the Emmy and was also shortlisted for the Oscars. He founded LemKino Pictures / Old Street Films and previously ran Channel 4’s Independent Investigations Unit winning 5 Royal Television Society Awards and a BAFTA. In 2025 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Northumbria University at Newcastle.
• Kasia Madera is a BBC News Channel journalist and presenter. Of Polish heritage and fluent in the Polish language, Madera regularly covers stories from Eastern and Central Europe. She specialises in international affairs with a personal insight into eastern Europe. At the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Madera was one of the first international journalists to report live from the Poland-Ukraine border, interviewing refugees in Polish and Ukrainian.

In partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute London

Credit: George Charles Beresford @ Wiki