As part of the Hereafter programme we are delighted to announce that writer, academic and critic Brian Dillon will speak on objects and afterlife at the annual Swedenborg Birthday Meeting 2025.

BRIAN DILLON is the author of several books, including In the Dark Room: A Journey in Memory (Penguin, 2005; Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018); Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009); Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011); I am Sitting in a Room (Cabinet, 2012); The Great Explosion (Penguin, 2015); Essayism (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017); Suppose a Sentence (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020); and Affinities (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023). Brian has written regularly for newspapers, magazines and reviews such as frieze, Granta, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Yale Review and has curated exhibitions at Tate Britain and Hayward Gallery. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London.

The Swedenborg Society’s annual Swedenborg Birthday Meeting began in 1929 as a fundraising initiative to help meet the costs deployed in the refurbishment and upkeep of the new Swedenborg House (which the Society had purchased in November 1924 and, after extensive building work, had first opened to the public in 1926).

The first meeting was billed as a ‘Social Reunion in commemoration of Swedenborg’s Birthday’ and held in Holborn Hall on Tuesday 29 January, with speeches, tableaux depicting the life and times of Swedenborg, musical items, community singing, dancing and refreshments. Evening dress was optional and over 400 people attended. The next year it had become the ‘Swedenborg Birthday Celebration Social’ and was moved to the recently opened Conway Hall in Red Lion Square. In the first two years (1929 and 1930), similar smaller events were also held around the country to raise money for the Swedenborg House Fund.

It wasn’t envisaged to be an annual event, but its popularity meant that it became one, with the Swedenborg Birthday Celebration usually taking place on a reduced scale with an ‘at Home’ at Swedenborg Hall, and featuring talks or speeches interspersed with musical performances and sometimes accompanied by an exhibition. By the 1960s the meeting would tend to be scheduled for the Saturday closest to Swedenborg’s birth date (29 January) and for many years it was the only regular annual fixture, alongside the formal AGM, in the Society’s events calendar.

Past recent speakers at the Swedenborg Birthday Meeting include philosopher David Berman, biographer and popular science writer David Bodanis, author and social historian Ken Worpole, and poets including Ruth Fainlight, Hannah Sullivan and Homero Aridjis (who read at a literary conference x10 staged for the Swedenborg Birthday Meeting in January 2019).

Simon Moretti, Double Vortex (after Emanuel Swedenborg), 2025. Neon, cables, transformer, 79 x 57 cm. Photo: Nick Malyon. Courtesy of the artist.