Seven Children: Danny Dorling book talk at Topping Edinburgh

Audio recording of Professor Danny Dorling’s talk on his new book Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation at Topping & Company Booksellers, Edinburgh, on 6 September 2024.

Danny begins by talking about how Seven Children differs from the other books he has written.

“This book is different in that it’s a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, and the reason I tried to do it was that non-fiction only gets through to a certain proportion of people… and it’s incredibly numbing. You can read the most terrible statistics and it doesn’t affect you – it has no emotion. But the stories of actual people, just a few paragraphs of actual lives, do affect us. So, if you are trying to get through what is happening, you have to present it in a different way.

“Now, I have no idea if I’ve succeeded. All I’ve succeeded on is persuading editor number 50 to take on the project, and edit it and for them to take a risk and print it. The scary thing is that so many people looked at earlier drafts and just went, no. So, it may just be terrible – I am going to find out.”

This recording includes an introduction by a Topping staff member and questions from the audience at the end.

Find out more about Topping & Company Booksellers:

Visit Danny Dorling’s Seven Children website:

Find out about forthcoming talks by Danny Dorling and listen to audio recordings of previous talks: