Talk for Arts' Societies

1 Robert Keable, Utterly Immoral WW1 chaplain and writer

2 Writers in 1920's Tahiti

Simon is an acredited lecturer with the Arts Society and listed in the Arts Society directory of lecturerers

Robert Keable, Utterly immoral WW1 chaplain and writer

In his talk Simon Keable-Elliott discusses the life and work of the 1920's novelist Robert Keable. Keable was a well respected writer and priest before and during the First World War who wrote the bestselling scandalous novel - Simon Called Peter. The novel is featured in The Great Gatsby and was turned into a Broadway play and the sequel into a Hollywood movie. The success of the novel allowed Keable to run away to live in Tahiti writing six more novels and eventually marrying a Tahitian princess.

Writers  in 1920's Tahiti

Following in the footsteps of Paul Gauguin, Robert Louis Stephenson, Rupert Brooke and Somerset Maugham a number of English-speaking writers settled in Tahiti in the 1920s. My talk looks at what drew them to Tahiti, their work on the island and their enduring legacy. Writers attracted to Tahiti after the war included James Norman Hall, Charles Nordhoff, Robert Keable, George Biddle, Robert Dean Frisbie and Robert Lee Eskridge,

Simon Keable-Elliott has been researching the writers living in Tahiti in the 1920s for a number of years. In July 2021 he took early retirement following 25 years as a secondary school politics teacher, and now works as a writer and lecturer. In his first book Utterly Immoral, Robert Keable and his scandalous novel, published in November 2022, he covered - among other topics - Robert Keable’s time in Tahiti

To see a list of  talks and lectures by Simon please visit his events page: https://robertkeable.com/events/

If you require any further information, please do email Simon on [email protected] or use the contact page to send a message.