Column Writing: Public and Personal

Join us to reflect on the process behind, and joy and power of the column.

Newspapers, magazines and digital journalism furnish us with inches upon inches of short, thought-provoking, opinion-shaping text every day. So how do you go about writing one of journalism’s most distinctive forms: a good column?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the first regular columnist of colour on a national newspaper in the UK, and columnist and editor Simon Jenkins, reflect on the art of column-writing from a writer’s perspective. How much of column-writing is storytelling? How do you bend this endlessly personal form to carry any number of opinions? And when you sit down to write your regular missive, what is, or should be, your main goal: to influence or to entertain?

Join us to reflect on the process behind, and joy and power of the column.

Chaired by author and journalist Alex Preston.

Alex Preston