Philip Davis

Reading, especially reading good books, is a form of mental travel. It offers new experiences, new perspectives, and can develop if not broaden the mind. Literature offers the reader time and space in which to explore his or her own inner life. With good books, we read ourselves awake, not to sleep, and are able to test what we discover in a book against the texture of life as we know it. The best writing is not about art for art’s sake but art for life’s sake (that’s the thinking behind this Festival anyway).

Editor of The Reader magazine, Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, and author of publications that include The Experience of Reading, Philip Davis is committed to the value of Literature and its role in life, today. His main concerns are Literature, emotion, and personal thinking, in particular, literary thinking as compared with other ways of thinking about existence. His latest book is Reading and the Reader.