With A Matter of Life & Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, Pressburger and Powell changed the face of cinema. Emeric Pressburger also wrote two novels; The Glass Pearls, a post-war thriller about a mysterious German émigré, was reissued by Faber last year to acclaim. Here his grandson Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning director of One Day in September and The Last King of Scotland, joins critic and novelist Anthony Quinn and TLS fiction editor Toby Lichtig to discuss his life and work on screen and page.

In Association with the TLS.

Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. From 1998 to 2013 he was film critic of The Independent. He has written nine novels, the first The Rescue Man, which won the 2009 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and the latest Molly & the Captain (2022). He also wrote the football memoir, Klopp: My Liverpool Romance.

Kevin Macdonald has directed both documentaries and feature films including The Last King of Scotland, One Day in September, Touching the Void, The Eagle and most recently The Mauritanian. His films have won multiple Oscars and Baftas. He has also written a biography of his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger, and is the co-editor with Mark Cousins of Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentaries.

Toby Lichtig is the Fiction and Politics Editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He writes for a range of publications and has appeared as a guest critic on various television and radio programmes. He also freelances as a documentary producer. Toby was chair of judges of the 2018 JQ/Wingate Prize and is the current chair of the EBRD Literature Prize.