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In conversation with author Charlotte Van den Broeck

Charlotte Van den Broeck talks about her book 'Bold Ventures' in search of buildings that were fatal for their architects.

In thirteen chapters, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal for their architects - architects who either killed themselves or are rumoured to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire built in seventeenth-century France to a theatre that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC., and an eerily sinking swimming pool in her hometown of Turnhout.

Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Charles Darwin to art history, stories from her own life and popular culture, patterns gradually come into focus, as Van den Broeck asks: what is that strange life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator? Threaded through each story, and in prose of great essayistic subtlety, Van den Broeck meditates on the question of suicide - what Albert Camus called the 'one truly serious philosophical problem' - in relation to creativity and public disgrace.

Bold Ventures: 13 Tales of Architectural Tragedy

The result is a profoundly idiosyncratic book, breaking new ground in literary non-fiction, as well as providing solace and consolation - and a note of caution - to anyone who has ever risked their hand at a creative act.

  • Time:
  • Location: Outwith - Bookshop,14 Albert Road, Glasgow, G42 8DN
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About the author(s)

Charlotte Van den Broeck (b. 1991) is a Belgian novelist and poet. Van den Broeck was acclaimed as one of Europe's most innovative and original new voices in poetry. Her debut volume Chameleon was published in 2015, with its sequel Nachtroer two years later. These two volumes are combined in...
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13 May