Our Second Guest Contributor : Writer Sara Kellow

Tags

Entering Competitions, Guest Writer, Helen Yendall's Blog About Writing, Kate Atkinson, The Guardian

With our second short story competition up and running, we thought we’d invite the winner of our first one to offer some encouraging words to those considering entering.

 

In a recent interview in The Guardian, bestselling author Kate Atkinson describes winning a writing competition as the moment that launched her as a published author. She doesn’t say, but I’d be willing to bet that wasn’t the first competition she ever entered.

Whether you win or not, writing for competitions is the best way to fast-track an improvement to your writing. I discovered this for myself several years ago when I stumbled across Helen Yendall’s Blog About Writing which happened to be running a 100-word story competition with a category for new writers. I’d never shown anything I’d written to anyone before and the idea of offering up my words to be judged made me feel ill. Cringing with embarrassment, I confronted my fear and entered, only to feel worse a week later when I was shortlisted. My story was on the blog for ANYONE to read. The horror! I couldn’t help noticing, though, that the sky didn’t fall in. Nobody pointed and laughed at me in the street; in fact everything was just the same, except that next time it was much easier.

Even though that early shortlisting turned out to be beginner’s luck, I’d gained something valuable. If you are shy about sharing your work, you should definitely enter competitions. A story that disappears without trace, no one needs to know about, but a shortlisting – that’s a tremendous confidence boost. Writing to a set word-count helps you focus. You have to reread your work and, by cutting out anything unnecessary, hone it to a new level of precision. I once misread the rules to a competition and wrote a 500-word story, which I was quite pleased with, only to find when I entered that it should have been 250. I cut out half the words and the resulting story has been shortlisted twice. One more edit and who knows? That’s the great thing about competitions. It can feel like rejection when you don’t get anywhere, but you can learn from the experience. Always read the winners and figure out why the judges chose them. Then go back to your own work with fresh ideas and try again.

Thank you, Sara. Your story, Laptops and Coffin Lids, was a worthy winner against strong competition. That intriguing title didn’t do it any harm, either.

It’s comforting to discover that so many writers seem to suffer from shrinking-violet syndrome, and important to remember that a professional writer is a writer who refuses to give up…

 

Advertisements

Our Sarah wins Colm Tóibín award

Tags

Colm Toibin International Short Story Competition 2019

One of our nine voices is frustratingly modest, but the other eight are BURSTING WITH PRIDE.

Our much-loved and madly talented Sarah has just won…..the Colm Tóibín International Short Story Award!

She won with her warm-hearted and poignant story, ‘Dinosaurs Rule’.  The Wexford Literary Festival judges clearly saw what we see – the lucidity, insightfulness and generosity of her writing.

Oh, we are so proud and so happy for her!  It will be extra crisps and chocolate cake at our next get-together…

Here she is: Sarah Dawson

What Lies Buried by Margaret Kirk

I have just finished Margaret Kirk’s second Highland Noir book What lies Buried.

Margaret hooks you, in the first chapter, with a corpse uncovered on an Inverness construction site. With a bullet hole in its skull. A cold case, obviously, since it’s wearing World War Two dog tags, but an intriguing one, since the bones date from long after the end of the war. And why were they buried in a farm midden? Then, having made you wonder about the who-and-why of these seventy-year-old bones, you are plunged into an even darker crime: a ten-tear-old girl has been spirited away from a friend’s birthday party and has been missing for ten days.

The police team led by DI Lukas Mahler is under pressure: from the distraught parents, their superior officers, the press – and their own desperate feelings of responsibility and inadequacy. Not helped when the problem unexpectedly escalates.

Lukas is a detective with sharp suits, but no ego. An early morning runner with his own childhood trauma, who struggles to care for a mother whose mind is failing, it’s no wonder he is stalked by migraine headaches: an ice-pick of pain tapping at the base of his skull that tablets refuse to shift. Not that Lukas will let that stop him pursuing the bad guys, even if it earns him cracked ribs.

I enjoyed the quality of the writing, from fondly remembered Scottish words – and guiltily scoffed bakery products with a high-calorie content – to descriptions of Inverness and its steel and granite weather. Memories rushed back of pebble-dashed bungalows, with walls the colour of three-day-old porridge. I especially admired the picture of an alarmed construction worker belting up the track, hi-vis jacket billowing out behind him like a bairn playing at superheroes. 

The characters are real people, with acid indigestion, a tendency to devour Jaffa cakes when stressed, and the misguided conviction that a Homer Simpson air freshener will banish the stink of cigarette smoke and fish and chip wrappers from inside of an unloved car. DS Ian Ferguson, a conscientious and loyal colleage, is a slob at heart. The sarcastic, shifty and jealous DE Andy Black clearly means trouble for Mahler.

Her women are good, from the pregnant CSI, easing herself from a muddy trench full of old bones, her pregnancy bump straining against the white Teletubby suit, to DC Nazreen Khan, who is suitably polite when slapped down for giving constructive advice to a superior, but no pushover:

‘Absolutely.’ She clicks her seat belt into place and gives him an earnest I’ll-try-harder kind of smile. ‘No disrespect, sir.’

‘Fine. We’ll leave it there, then.’

‘But, seeing we’re talking about respect…if I catch you staring at my tits again, you’ll get my knee where it hurts most. And then I’ll hit you with a harassment charge. Sir.‘

A disturbing feature is an on-line group of vigilantes, convinced they can do a better job than the police. A worrying glimpse into the world of warped minds and the harm social media can do.

The plot has more complexities than a piece of Fair Isle knitting, and a twist approaching the end almost made me throw down my needles. There is even an intriguing ‘H’ figure lurking in the background. The abduction of a small girl doesn’t make comfortable reading. It is every parent’s nightmare. But the book is enlightening on the toll taken on those investigating such hideous events, and the extent to which they genuinely care.

Margaret’s debut novel, Shadow Man, won the Good Housekeeping First Novel Competition in 2016 and was published by Orion in 2017. Proof that entering competitions can work, and that reading books that result from them can be totally gripping.

 

Things I heard Simon Mawer say

Tags

'The Glass Room', 1968, Arthropods, Czech Centre, Czechoslovakia, HG Wells, Hitchhiking, Man Booker Prize, Mendel's Dwarf, Moody Blues, Oxford, Prague Spring, RAF, Simon Mawer, Warsaw Pact, Zoology

This week I heard the author Simon Mawer speak about writing: specifically about his novel Prague Spring, but also his other Czech-based books The Glass Room and Mendel’s Dwarf. Prague Spring is set against the events in Czechoslovakia in the fateful summer of 1968, leading to the invasion by the armies of the Warsaw Pact.

Four things of writerly interest in my mind from that talk:

He was asked what effect having The Glass Room shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009 had for his career. It benefited hugely, he said, sales went right up, though not as much as if he’d won! He was easy about not actually winning that year, he assured us, though he was just a bit galled when Hilary won it again two years later …

One good thing about being a novelist, he told us, is that you can reinvent your own life. The example he gave was how in the summer of 1968 he had hitchhiked around Europe with a male friend. When in Bavaria they had discussed whether to cross into Czechoslovakia, then enjoying the best days of the Prague Spring, but had decided to go to Greece instead: a decision he had ever since regretted. In Prague Spring two of his main characters set out from England to hitchhike across Europe – a male student (as he had been) James, but this time with an attractive female companion, Ellie; and this time events lead them to cross the Iron Curtain (and thus into the story) rather than go to the Italian sun as planned.

He used more of his own direct experience in James and Ellie’s story. When he and his friend had been hitching they were given a lift by a German lady harpsichordist who interrogated him where he was studying, and when he gave the name of his Oxford college she asked if he knew a particular law professor there, whose friend she was. In Prague Spring he retells this story, with James and Ellie meeting a lady cellist who, likewise, is a friend of a don at his Oxford college.

Perhaps less commonly for novelists, Simon Mawer has a scientific background: his degree was in zoology and for many years he worked as a biology teacher. This shows in a remarkable simile in one of the extracts he read to us on Tuesday: a Russian tank lost in the streets of Prague is likened first to a Martian in HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds but then, more uniquely, to a reptile or arthropod, the muzzle of its gun being a proboscis, which “shifts back and forth, as though sniffing the air, perhaps even trying to work out where the humans have gone.” Not an image that would have occurred to those of us with English literature or history backgrounds, perhaps.

In thrillers, he reminded us (and in whodunits, come to think of it), everything that happens must be related to the plot. But life, of course, isn’t like that. Lots of things happen that don’t link up with anything else. But in a novel you can explore these, and tell them for their own sake. One bizarre episode that features in Prague Spring but is not essential to the plot is the appearance of the Moody Blues. They actually were in Prague at this time, and the day before the Russian invasion they were filmed performing on the city’s famous Charles Bridge. Their appearance in the novel adds colour and interest and tells a true story, and you’re glad it’s there, but in a thriller you’d be wondering what its significance was.

(You can see this surreal performance on YouTube – go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4_xCA4IO7U , to see these Brummies miming Nights in White Satin to adoring fans on an otherwise empty Charles Bridge for a Franco-Belgian TV programme. It’s strange to think that 24 hours later that area was busy with invading soldiers.)

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction Dept: In his interview Simon Mawer asked us to reflect on the fact that once the invasion happened, the British Embassy somehow arranged for the Moody Blues to be flown out of the country, apparently in an RAF transport plane. How was it, he asked, that in all the chaos and busyness of those events, someone managed to persuade the new Warsaw Pact controllers of the country to allow an RAF plane into Czechoslovak air space to evacuate a group of British pop singers? Would you dare put such an unlikely happening in a novel?

The interview was organised by the Czech Centre at the Czech Embassy in London. Simon was interviewed by Prague-based journalist David Vaughan, followed by a lively Q&A session with the audience.  Thanks, Czech Centre!

Prague Spring was featured on this blog at https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2018/12/10/prague-spring/ and The Glass Room at https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/the-glass-room-revisited/ . You can listen to all of Simon Mawer’s talk at https://soundcloud.com/czech-centre-london/simon-mawer-prague-spring .

‘Swanking’ – unavoidable for authors?

Tags

Mary Killen, The Spectator

‘Swanking is still unacceptable’ says Mary Killen, on the (always enjoyable) Your Problems Solved page of this week’s The Spectator magazine. She is replying to an anxious letter from a reader  who would like to give copies of his/her two  ‘respectably published’ novels to neighbours and acquaintances who are unaware of the novels’ existence, but worries that these gifts put the recipients in an awkward position.

There is something altogether endearing about this concern for the feelings of others and the appeal for advice in general ‘about trumpet-blowing, however subtly done’. The writer says that in his/her younger days ‘swanking’ was considered the worst of sins …

Mary comes up with a creative solution to the problem perfectly tailored to this particular correspondent. But for most of us it may be that swanking is now a necessity – part and parcel of publishing and marketing novels, however much it goes against the grain.

 

Writing Competitions to Enter in June

Tags

Audio Arcadia's General Fiction Short Story Competition, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Bath Novel Award, British Czech & Slovac Association Competition for Short Stories and non-fiction, British Fantasy Society Short Story Competition, Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, Divine Chocolate Poetry Competition, Hastings Literary Festival Short Story Competition, Impress Prize for New Writers, Ninevoices' Short Story Competition, Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, The Moth Short Story Prize, VS Pritchett Memorial Prize, Wells Festival of Literature

This is a BIG MONTH for us, since we will be launching one of ninevoices’ rare and sought-after competitions on JUNE 21st. Please WATCH OUT FOR DETAILS on that date!

Meanwhile you can hone your skills on some of the other competitions out there – nobody said you need only enter one.

There’s just time to squeeze in for the Bath Novel Award deadline of June 2nd. They want the first 5,000-words of a novel, plus a synopsis. Prizes: 1st £2,500; 2nd, agent introductions and manuscript feedback; 3rd, Cornerstones’ course. Entry fee: £25. Details: bathnovelaward.co.uk

Bath Flash Fiction Award – a thrice-yearly competition for flash fiction up to 300 words. Prizes: £1,000; £300; £100, Entry fee: £9. Closing date for current competition 10 June. Details: bathflashfictionaward.com

Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting for full-length (at least an hour) new stage plays written in English, which have not been published or professionally performed. Prizes: £16,000; 2x£8,000. FREE ENTRY. Deadline 5 June. Details: http://www.writeaplay.co.uk

Divine Chocolate Poetry Competition for poems on the theme ‘how can chocolate change the world? From poets aged 7-11;  12-16; and 17-plus. Prizes: Divine chocolate and goodies. Free entry. Closing date: 14 June. Details: http://www.divinechocolate.com/uk/poetry

Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for poetry (up to five poems), fiction and life writing, up to 3,000 words. Prizes: £1,000 in each category, plus publication in Wasafiri. Entry fee: £6 for one category; £10 for two categories; £15 for three categories. Closing date 28 June. Details: http://www.wasafiri.org

VS Pritchett Memorial Prize for unpublished short stories between 2,000 and 4,000 words. Prizes: £1,000, plus publication. Entry fee: £5. Closing date: 28 June. Details: http://www.rslit.org

British Fantasy Society Short Story Competition for any kind of fantasy short stories, horror, sf, magic realism, etc., up to 5,000 words. Prizes: £100, £50, £20, membership of BFS and publication in BFS Horizons. Entry fee: £5 (free for BFS members). Closing date: 30 June. Details: http://www.britishfantasysociety.co.uk

Audio Arcadia’s General Fiction Short Story Competition for stories up to 5,000 words. Prizes: Anthology publication, royalties. Entry fee: £5.50. Closing date: 30 June. Details: http://www.audioarcadia.com

Hastings Literary Festival Short Story Competitions, for short story, poem and flash fiction on the festival theme ‘In Other Words‘ – an exploration of difference and otherness. Prizes: £100; £40; £25 in each category. Entry fee: £5. Closing date: 30 June. Details: http://www.HastingsLitFest.org

Impress Prize for New Writers are looking for full-length debuts from unpublished fiction and non-fiction writers. Submit proposal and sample chapter, 6,000 words maximum. Prizes: £500 advance and publication. Entry fee: £25. Closing date: 30 June. Details: http://www.impress-books.co.uk

Wells Festival of Literature short stories between 1,000 and 2,000 words; poems up to 40 lines; stories for children. Prizes: £750, £300, £200, local prize of £100 in each category. Entry fee: £6. Closing date: 30 June. Details: http://www.wellsfestivalofliterature.org.uk

The Moth Short Story Prize 2019 for unpublished stories of up to 5,000 words on any subject. Prizes: 1st, 3,000 Euros; 2nd, Writing Retreat at Circle of Misse in France, plus 250 Euros; 3rd 1,000 Euros. Entry fee: 12 Euros. Closing date: 30 June.  Details: wwwthemothmagazine.com

Last, but by no means least, is the British Czech & Slovak Association Competition for short stories and non-fiction – up to 2,000-words – exploring the links between Britain and the Czech/Slovak Republics at any time. The suggested, but optional, theme for 2019 is ‘1989’. As has been said before, this does not have to be a worthy, scholarly piece (though please feel free, if that’s your thing…) but could equally be inspired by a honeymoon, a student trip, or even a hen-night, in Prague. By a haunting among those atmospheric buildings around Wenceslas Square. By a cold war spy tale. A memory of trying to make dumplings… ENTRY IS FREE. Prizes: £400, £150, publication in the British Czech & Slovak Review. Plus an invitation to a glittering dinner in London at which you will be presented with your prize.

As ever, let me urge you to check the details before entry. There’s a good spread of competitions this month, and I’m personally greatly tempted by the idea of receiving a hamper of Divine Chocolate… Just the thing to munch on while composing your 150,000-word masterpiece.

 

‘A Perfect Book’ – John Betjeman and Excellent Women

Tags

Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Carolyn Pickles, Excellent Women, Frances Grey, Georgia Powell, Jane Slavin, John Betjeman, Malcolm Sinclair, Martin Hutson, Penelope Wilton, St Alban's Centre, Tristram Powell

For John Betjeman, Barbara Pym’s novel Excellent Women was ‘a perfect book’. Nobody listening to a splendid adaptation of it at the Barbara Pym Society Spring meeting in London would disagree. Probably some of the audience had read it so many times they practically knew every delicious line.

But what came across forcibly was that the novel, as adapted here by Georgia Powell and directed by Tristram Powell, worked so brilliantly in the format of a radio play. Large chunks and several characters were cut out but it was still perfect. This must be because the book is really written as a series of delightfully observed scenes; we are not waiting impatiently to see what happens next but savouring the fullness of every moment.

Each character in a Barbara Pym novel has a distinctive way of speaking; what they say could not possibly be spoken by anyone else. Another writing lesson here, I found myself thinking. I happily shut my eyes and listened to the actors playing the characters who are always living in the heads of Barbara Pym devotees, some of them taking on multiple parts – Frances Grey, Malcolm Sinclair, Martin Hutson, Jane Slavin, Carolyn Pickles – and Penelope Wilton as the narrator capturing the sly comedy of Barbara Pym’s voice.

Excellent Women was published in 1952, twenty years after John Betjeman’s first radio programme. If he’d been sitting with us in the St Alban’s Centre on Sunday he too would have revelled in this adaptation of the book he described as perfect. As he wrote, ‘Excellent Women is England, and, thank goodness, it is full of them.’

Exeter Novel Prize

Tags

Competitions

Huge congratulations to Rebecca Kelly for winning this year’s Exeter Novel Prize with her novel Skin-whistle. Unfortunately, Rebecca was unwell on Saturday and is therefore not in this line-up pic of the prizegiving.

However, ninevoices‘ own talented Sarah is there (in her spotty dress), having been shortlisted for the second time in two years. Many congratulations to Sarah and to all this year’s longlistees and shortlistees.

L to R: Freya Sampson (shortlistee), Cathie Hartigan (CWM), Broo Doherty (DHH Literary Agency) Sophie Duffy (CWM), Kathleen Jowitt, Sarah Dawson, Emma Albrighton, Debbie Fuller-White (all shortlistees)

Anthony Trollope: clergymen we love

Tags

Anthony Trollope, Archdeacon Grantly, Barchester Towers, Cardinal Newman, clergymen, Josiah Crawley, Obadiah Slope, Septimus Harding, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Warden, The Way We Live Now, Victorian novels

‘I don’t know that clergymen are so much better than other men,’ says the wife of Archdeacon Grantly in Barchester Towers. Anyone familiar with the stream of clergymen in Anthony Trollope’s forty-seven novels might well agree.

For Trollope certainly doesn’t treat clergymen any differently to his other characters, holding them up to the same well-polished mirror to expose their mixed motives and moral vacillation. But he rarely intrudes on what we might call their relationship with God. Instead he shows us their relationships with their families, fellow clergy and wider society.

Trollope’s clergymen are never depicted as simple goodies or baddies; they are thoroughly human, a fluctuating mix of strength and weakness. The most saintly is probably Septimus Harding, first introduced to us in The Warden, the meek, sweet-natured, peace-loving precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram’s Hospital. He isn’t perfect – he’s not especially hard-working or energetic – but he provides a quiet, underlying morality throughout the six Barchester novels. Even when upset by the sermon delivered by Obadiah Slope, he responds with habitual gentleness that ‘Christian ministers are never called on by God’s word to insult the convictions, or even the prejudices of their brethren.’

Trollope himself was essentially tolerant in his approach to religion. It’s the clerics who push their version of Christianity down other people’s throats who come in for the most stick in his novels. The extremely tiresome Roman Catholic priest Father Barham in The Way We Live Now according to Trollope’s notes was based on the real life George Bampfield, who when staying with the Trollopes ‘made himself absolutely unbearable’ with his aggressive proselytising and criticism of the Anglican church. In the same novel Father Barham is contrasted to the affable Bishop Yeld, thoroughly relaxed as to dogma, but clearly effective and well regarded in his diocese. But Trollope is always even-handed. In The Macdermots of Ballycloran we are given a picture of kindness and Christian compassion in the exemplary Roman Catholic priest Father John McGrath.

There are good and bad apples everywhere, in all Christian traditions, in high and low churchmanship. Most infamous of all is Obadiah Slope, the slimy evangelical chaplain to the hen-pecked bishop in Barchester Towers who cloaks himself in pious virtue while plotting to rule the diocese and suggesting that old-style clergymen like Mr Harding should be carried away on ‘the rubbish cart’ of history. Then there’s his taste for rich widows … In Miss Mackenzie Trollope caricatures what he saw as evangelical cant in the Revd Jeremiah Maguire, but there are low churchmen who are altogether excellent such as Mr Saul the curate in The Claverings. As for villains at the high church end we have the murderous chaplain Mr Greenwood in Marion Fay.

Clergymen as minor characters often provide some of the best comedy in Trollope’s novels and we are treated to a delightful variety, including Montagu Blake, irritatingly jolly and pleased with himself in An Old Man’s Love, Thomas Gibson, ‘a sort of tame-cat parson’ fought over by ladies in He Knew He Was Right, or Caleb Thumble, Mrs Proudie’s time-serving stoodge in The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Especially appealing to modern readers may be those clergymen heroes who challenge intransigent and intolerant attitudes within society and the church – attractive examples are Frank Fenwick, befriending a fallen woman in The Vicar of Bulhampton and Dr Wortle, pugnaciously resisting interference from parents and his bishop in Dr Wortle’s School.

It is in the portraits of clergymen developed over the course of several novels that we see Trollope’s penetrating insight into human frailty and yet capacity for change. The proud and wealthy Archdeacon Grantly, first introduced to us in The Warden, comes across as bullying and worldly when compared to his self-depreciating father-in-law Mr Harding: ‘looking like an ecclesiastical statue … a fitting impersonation of the church militant here on earth; one hand ensconced within his pocket, evinced the practical hold which our mother church keeps on her temporal possessions; and the other, loose for action, was ready to fight if need be for her defence’. By the final volume of the six Barchester novels we come to recognise and value the man underneath.

If Theophilus Grantly and Septimus Harding are the clergymen most beloved by readers, Trollope himself believed that he would be remembered for three characters, only one of them a cleric: Plantagenet Palliser, Lady Glencora, and Josiah Crawley, the perpetual curate of Hogglestock. ‘I claim to have portrayed the mind of the unfortunate man with great accuracy and great delicacy. The pride, the humility, the manliness, the weakness, the conscientious rectitude and bitter prejudices of Mr Crawley were, I feel, true to nature and well described.’ Josiah Crawley is an unattractive character, first appearing in Framley Parsonage where he reproves the pleasure-loving young vicar Mark Robarts, and in his pride and anger at his own poverty creates extra trouble and suffering for his poor wife and children. There is never any doubting his holiness – significantly among the rough and poor brickmakers of Hoggle End he is ‘held in high respect’ – but it is in The Last Chronicle of Barset that he becomes a tragic figure, the half-mad saint unjustly accused.

Trollope was writing at a time when the Church of England was facing much-needed change. Trollope was generally on the side of reform – many of the novels expose the cruelly unequal pay structure – but as always he can empathise with its victims and reveal the occasional less pleasant side of the reformers. ‘Till we can become divine we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for a change we sink to something lower.’ (Barchester Towers). His natural sympathies were at the high church end, alongside Archdeacon Grantly and Mr Harding, but he believed that the church should accept difference: ‘We are too apt to look at schism in our church as an unmitigated evil. Moderate schism, if there may be such a thing…teaches men to think upon religion.’ (Barchester Towers). Interestingly, Cardinal Newman was a devoted reader of Trollope’s novels.

Trollope was a Victorian, and the Victorians saw the novel as an effective way to influence people; novels ought to instruct as well as entertain. ‘Gentle readers, the physic is always beneath the sugar, hidden or unhidden. In writing novels, we novelists preach to you from our pulpits.’ Neither in his life nor in his novels did Trollope make a parade of his own belief in God’s mercy and goodness, but it underlies everything he wrote until his death in 1882. ‘I trust… I shall not be thought to scoff at the pulpit, though some may imagine that I do not feel all the reverence that is due to the cloth. I may question the infallibility of the teachers, but I hope that I shall not therefore be accused of doubt as to the thing taught.’

Tomorrow is the 24th of April and Anthony Trollope’s birthday. Perhaps Mr Harding’s words to the bedesmen of Hiram’s Hospital in The Warden could also be Trollope’s wish for himself and all of us: ‘I hope you may live contented, and die trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thankful to Almighty God for the good things he has given you.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oxbridge Literary Festivals this week

Tags

Boat Race, Cambridge, David Owen, Francesca Simon, George Monbiot, Hilary Benn, Iris Murdoch, Jo Brand, Joanne Harris, K-Tel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Heseltine, Michael Morpurgo, Mortlake, Oxford, Philip Collins, Putney, Ranulph Fiennes, Robert Harris, Roger McGough, Simon Mayo, Tracey Thorn, Val McDermid

This weekend sees the annual University Boat Race – Oxford squaring off against Cambridge on the Thames between Putney and Mortlake. But this time of year also sees a more cerebral rivalry – their Literary Festivals.

The dark blue Festival is already under way (https://oxfordliteraryfestival.org/) . Oxford events started on Saturday 30 March and continue till Sunday 7 April. “350 speakers from 25 countries”. Performers or interviewees still to come include Ranulph Fiennes, Robert Harris, Jo Brand, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Owen, Michael Heseltine, Val McDermid, Joanne Harris and Michael Morpurgo. And many more, as they used to say on the compilation LPs they used to sell in the 1970s. (Were they on the K-Tel label?)

Turning a paler blue, the Cambridge Spring Festival (http://www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/) runs from Friday 5 April to Sunday 5 April. Like Oxford’s, the schedule is too full to list here, but it includes George Monbiot on A Plea For The Planet, Tracey Thorn on A Teenager in Suburbia, Forever Iris (“celebrating the centenary of a magnificent novelist”), Philip Collins on How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics, Francesca Simon on Horrid Henry, Simon Mayo on The Power of Storytelling, Hilary Benn MP on Finding A Way Forward, and Roger McGough with A Night of Poetry and Performance. And many more.

Two real feasts! So if you have the time this week, get along to one of these two ancient seats of learning. You’ll come back with inspiration for your own writing, and rather a lot of books …