This talk considers animals, who we think they are, and who they really are: gods or demons; friends or foe; familiars or pests; ‘were’ creatures and other shapeshifters.
For millennia, we’ve been combining our image with other animals in our art, stories and spiritual beliefs, and looking to the natural world with awe and reverence, with envy and fear. Since prehistory, animals have pawed and slivered through our material culture, and probably through our stories, from the 40,000-year-old animal figurines found in Swabian Jura to the explosion of cave paintings that followed. In the ancient world, animals gave form to gods, guardians and monsters, from the monumental sphinxes and lamassu to the Potnia Theon (or Mistress of Beasts) and were frequently referenced in myths, sometimes as creatures to protect, at other times as monsters to slay. In many regions, animals still dominate human pantheons. But in dominant cultures our relationships with animals have transfigured. Animals still weave through our foundational myths, place names, nursery rhymes and children’s stories, but are strangely absent in our contemporary adult stories. Writing The Book of Beasts, Elizabeth Sulis Kim set out on a journey around the world, and across time, to find out what happened to our relationships with other animals, and to meditate on what our future relationships could look like if we told different stories.
About the Speaker
Elizabeth Sulis Kim is a Scotland-based writer and the editor of Cunning Folk magazine. Her writing has appeared in/on Mslexia, the LA Review of Books, TANK, Ambit, BBC Culture, The Guardian, Hellebore, and Fiddler’s Green, among others. She holds an MA in French & Italian from the University of Edinburgh and is an independent ‘folk’ researcher. She is the author of The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom, published by Chatto & Windus, and The Art of Folklore, published by Frances Lincoln.and award-winning radio writer, including as lead dramatist for the National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre on the Air podcast drama which, in 2020, was archived by the Library of Congress for its ‘historical and cultural significance’.
Your curator and host for this event will be the author Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is All the Fear of the Fair (pub. Oct 2025) the second anthology he’s edited for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
[Image: Detail from ‘Two fantastical beasts’. Gouache painting by a Persian artist. Source: Wellcome Collection (ref: 582624i).]
