Literature Matters: RSL 200 – Gillian Anderson and Andrew O'Hagan get into Character

Gillian Anderson has built a career on inventing, inhabiting and adapting some of the most memorable characters ever written. She won an Emmy Award for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Crown, a global audience for her role as sex therapist Jean Milburn in Sex Education, and international fame as FBI Special Agent Dana Scully in The X-Files.

But what is it that brings a character to life? And how does it feel to give physical form to words on a page? In this Literature Matters: RSL 200 event, Gillian Anderson and her friend, novelist and RSL Fellow Andrew O’Hagan, will study some of their favourite literary characters, and explore why literature matters so much to them.

Andrew O'Hagan is a novelist and non-fiction author from Glasgow. Three of his novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize for Fiction and he has won several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award. In 2003 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. He is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Granta magazine, and a Fellow of the RSL. His most recent novel, Mayflies (2020), won the Christopher Isherwood Prize.

Gillian Anderson’s many credits include the roles of FBI Special Agent Dana Scully in the series The X-Files, socialite Lily Bart in Terence Davies's film The House of Mirth (2000), DSU Stella Gibson in the BBC/RTÉ crime drama television series The Fall, sex therapist Jean Milburn in Sex Education, and Margaret Thatcher in The Crown. Among other honours, she has won two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards.