Gary Francione, Kate Levey, Richard Canning and Gerri Kimber chaired by Michael Caines

Law and philosophy professor Gary Francione, Brigid Brophy experts Professor Richard Canning and Dr Gerri Kimber and Brophy’s daughter Kate Levey discuss the life and work of the novelist, essayist, feminist, and animal rights campaigner Brigid Brophy.

Brophy was an Anglo-Irish writer and polemicist who campaigned on many fronts including vegetarianism, humanism, feminism, gay rights and animal rights. She is particularly known for igniting the debate about animal rights.

Francione, a world- leading authority on animal rights and the first academic to teach animal rights theory in an American law school, says Brophy was ahead of her time on animal rights and deserves to be better known. Her thinking, expressed in a series of essays in the 1960s and 1970s, laid the seeds of animal rights theory but was ignored or erased by contemporary and mainly male philosophers. Francione is author with his wife Anna Charlton of Eat Like You Care: An Examination of the Morality of Eating Animals.

Canning, a professor of British and American literature, and Kimber, visiting professor in English at the University of Northampton, are editors of the recent book Brigid Brophy: Avant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist. The book explores the whole of Brophy’s literary career and includes contributions on animal rights, vegetarianism, anti-vivisectionism, humanism, feminism and sexual politics. It includes contributions from Brophy herself, literary critics, animal rights activists and her daughter, Kate Levey. Levey is a retired primary teacher who now dedicates herself to perpetuating her mother’s legacy.

Discussions are chaired by Michael Caines, an editor at the Times Literary Supplement and co-editor of the Brixton Review of Books. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century.

Part of the festival’s programme of Irish literature and culture.