Book Launch & Q&A I Ian Penman and Lou Stoppard: Erik Satie Three Piece Suite
Forthcoming event
Overview
Talk starts at 6pm
Join us for an evening of conversation in collaboration with Fitzcarraldo Editions, between the music critic Ian Penman and writer and curator, Lou Stoppard. They will be discussing Ian's latest book, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite, amongst his other work.
Composer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before Surrealism and a conceptual artist before Conceptual Art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre’s Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demi-monde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman’s masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure.
Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Harper’s and City Journal. He is the author of the collections Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent’s Tail, 1998) and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019). His first original book, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize for Literature and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography in 2024.
Lou Stoppard is a London-based writer and curator. She has written for The Financial Times, Aperture, The New York Times and The New Yorker. Her books include a survey of the work of street photographer Shirley Baker, published by Mack in 2019; Pools, an exploration of swimming in photography, published by Rizzoli in 2020; and Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography, published by Mack in 2024, to time with an exhibition of the same name, which she curated at MEP, Paris. Her fiction has appeared in publications including Five Stories for Philip Guston, published by Printed Matter, Inc in 2024.