Claire Squires, Director of the Centre for International Publishing and Communication, will be contributing to a panel that addresses the topic of literary celebrity – and celebrities as ‘writers’ – at Birkbeck, University of London, on Thursday 3 December. In the age of J K Rowling and Jordan, the panel will ask, is literary celebrity good for literary culture?

She will be speaking alongside the biographer Claire Harman and novelist and short-story writer Toby Litt.