Saturday, June 12, 2010

My hero / Jeri Johnson by Kate Moss

 

Jeri Johnson

My hero: Jeri Johnson

by Kate Mosse
Saturday 12 June 2010

I

arrived at university in the autumn of 1981 to a college that had only recently admitted women – the concession was to put full-length mirrors on some of the staircases – and an English course that had remained set in its ways for some few hundred years, give or take.

I had a fledgling knowledge of feminism and was starting to think about politics and the higgledy-piggledy world beyond the classroom, but my non-academic reading was more Agatha Christie than Kate Millett. Then a new tutor arrived, Dr Jeri Johnson, an American and James Joyce specialist. Looking back, I realise she was barely older than us, but at the time she seemed very grown up. Jeri transformed my experience of university. It wasn't just a matter of introducing new authors – Flannery O'Connor, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich – but rather that she encouraged us to think differently, to understand the interconnectedness of things, to find the story behind the story. Placing books and their authors in a context, seeing the influences of a person's life that might or might not impact on their work, was not how I'd been brought up. She taught that sometimes, as students or artists, we would need to stand our ground. And that speaking up, whether as the sole female student in a lecture hall, or at work, mattered.

On Wednesday evening, I stood in the Royal Festival Hall in London looking out over the hundreds of people gathered to toast 15 years of the Orange prize for fiction. The prize honours literature of excellence, originality and imagination, it connects great writers with enthusiastic readers. But also it creates a space in which women can be artists and their voices can be heard, the lesson I learned 30 years ago in a classroom in Oxford. And in the crowd, standing next to my son and daughter, was Jeri, inspiring the next generation of readers and writers.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016

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