WIZO Literary Lunch 2024 – POSTPONED
WIZO Literary Lunch 2024 with guest speaker Rachel Cockerell, author of ‘Melting Point’ in conversation with journalist and producer Wendy Robbins.
An ingenious and idiosyncratic book about the search for a Jewish homeland that blends high politics and family memoir.
Rachel Cockerell was born and raised in London, the sixth of seven children. She did her BA at the Courtauld Institute and her MA at City University. Her research has taken her to Texas, Ohio, New York, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Praise for Melting Point:
“History that reads like a novel… bristles into vivid, bustling life.”
Robert Macfarlane
“Cockerell’s approach, drawing together a vast range of original source material, brings her cast of characters to life with vivacity, their idiosyncrasies and foibles intact.”
The Telegraph
“So fascinating, so enjoyable, and beautifully told.”
Simon Sebag Montefiore
“I think non-fiction will be different as a result. That’s a big claim, but I think people will write books now, and they’ll try and copy this as a style. It requires extraordinary research, but the juxtaposing means you hear the story unfolding.”
Jonathan Freedland
Wendy Robbins is the Executive Producer of the critically acclaimed feature documentary “The Commandant’s Shadow.” The film recently won the Yad Vashem Award for Outstanding Holocaust-related material and has been shown in more than a thousand cinemas worldwide. Wendy worked for 20 years as a BBC journalist and presenter and specialises in bringing intimate observational documentaries to a wide audience, with sensitivity and humour. Over the past three decades, she has conceived, developed and executive produced a line-up of challenging films across a variety of platforms. From the British Royal Family to US prisons, assisted suicide to ballroom dancing, she has worked across many genres, covering news, current affairs, documentaries, and entertainment. Career highlights include getting an innocent man off death row in the US, a guilty man jailed in the UK for selling passports for sex, interviewing 5 Royals and 2 former Prime Ministers, and winning a Royal Television Society Award for her portrayal of life in London’s Mayfair. She also memorably tracked down Saddam Hussein’s jovial barber, who had a story or two to tell, and had her early career on The Sunday Times immortalised on screen by actress Celia Meiras in the BBC drama-doc Nuclear Secrets. The episode depicted Wendy’s role as a 21-year-old Jewish intern, told to work on the story of Mordechai Vanunu, who arrived at the newspaper’s offices on her first day. She has also worked as a commissioning editor in BBC History and produced and reported a BBC World Service series on anti-semitism and Holocaust denial. She presented her own mini-series on the BBC’s popular The One Show, in which she interviewed people who had made huge ethical or moral decisions, and for BBC Radio she presented the highly regarded The House I Grew Up In, in which she took high-profile figures back to their childhood homes to explore the forces that had shaped them.
For more information contact: emma@wizouk.org