Our second Sunday Salon asked you to ditch date night, skip the box of chocolates and think twice about that bunch of flowers. Instead we gathered at the Galander Bar in Kreuzberg to indulge in an evening dedicated to Venus, goddess of love and lust.
Our podcast features the pianist Polly Trope, author Susanna Forrest, who spilled the beans about her time at The Erotic Review, and the writer and translator Saskia Vogel, who debuted an excerpt from her novel I AM A PORNOGRAPHER, a journey of love, death and sex work in the underbelly of Los Angeles. We also inaugurated our very own Bad Sex Writing Award with a live sex writing competition which was won by the fabulous Charlotte and her scintillating Octopus Porn – the filthily entertaining denouement of our Sunday Salon #2 podcast.
SASKIA VOGEL is a writer and translator. She’s been a publicist at Granta and an editor for many publications including AVN (Adult Video Network). Her reading included an excerpt from her novel in progress I AM A PORNOGRAPHER.
SUSANNA FORREST has just finished The Age of the Horse, her second nonfiction title for Atlantic Books. It’s an eclectic history of the relationship between horses and mankind that takes in everything from Bronze Age tribes of the steppes to traumatised US army veterans, bull-fighting in Portugal and terrorist attacks on abattoirs. Her first book, If Wishes Were Horses, tackled the phenomenon of horse-crazy girls. It was acclaimed as “richly evocative” (The Guardian), “Delicious” (Melanie Reid, The Times), “lyrical” (Sunday Telegraph) and “delightful and exhaustively researched” (TLS). She’s written for the New York Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Times and others, and got her first break editing and commissioning writers like Michel Faber, DBC Pierre and Sarah Hall at the Erotic Review magazine
