NARNIA fans flocked to the Arts Centre yesterday to attend Oxford don Alister McGrath’s talk about acclaimed author C.S. Lewis.
Unlike the many other biographies of Lewis, McGrath’s C.S. Lewis: A Life is organised not by the chronological order of his life but by the different worlds he occupied, like as Oxford, Cambridge and Narnia. McGrath said: “In writing this biography I had an audience in mind. I thought the person I should write for was someone who read the Narnia novels and wanted to know more about how the man who wrote them saw the world.”
As well as offering an oversight to his new book, McGrath also spoke about the importance and relevance of storytelling for Lewis. “Lewis saw himself as an imaginative writer, not an imaginary writer. He took what he saw in the world around him and took it further,” he said.
McGrath also talked about Lewis’ relationship with Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkein and his conversion to Christianity in 1929.
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