1930s aviation in fiction
Join Kate Macdonald online in conversation with Professor Luke Seaber.
Event details
Free
We are delighted to present the next online talk with Kate Macdonald, historian and director of Handheld Press.
Kate Macdonald will be in conversation with Luke Seaber of University College London on the remarkable aviation writing of John Llewelyn Rhys, and the culture of the air in 1930s Britain.
John Llewelyn Rhys was an RAF flight instructor and a novelist, and died in a training flight in August 1940, aged 29. His widow Jane Oliver (co-author of the best-selling Business as Usual, also from Handheld Press) founded the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in his memory.
Rhys published three books in his short life. The Flying Shadow (1936) is a remarkable novel about life at a south of England flying school, taut with tension. The World Owes Me A Living (1939) focuses on the itinerant lives of professional pilots without a war to fight in, and England Is My Village (1941) is his posthumous collection of short stories of the air in peace and in war.