Tickets for this Battle of Ideas festival satellite event, hosted by East Midlands Salon, are £3 (plus fee) from Eventbrite.

Last year was the 700th anniversary year of the completion of Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which he famously recounts his journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, guided by the Latin poet Virgil.

Seven-hundred years on, Divine Comedy continues to express a very human sense of justice. The characters in the first part of the Divine Comedy have made a lasting impression on generations of readers, along with the sheer poetry of the Comedy, even in translation from Dante’s native Florentine dialect. Perhaps that’s because, as well as writing in the everyday vernacular rather than the prestige language of Latin, Dante peopled the afterlife with many of his own contemporaries, as well as more celebrated figures from history and mythology. The result is that all are portrayed as realistic individuals, in graphic and often gory detail.

This special Battle of Ideas festival satellite event hosted by the East Midlands Salon explores the enduring legacy of Dante’s Inferno with writer Dolan Cummings. Cummings is author of Gehenna: a novel of Hell and Earth in which Dante’s Hell is seen through the prism of modern Glasgow which acts as a means to investigate contemporary intuitions about morality and justice.

Dolan will be in conversation with one of the Salon organisers, Vanessa Pupavac, to start the discussion.