Oxbridge Literary Festivals this week

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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 …

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The Cambridge Literary Festival

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Andy Stanton, Cambridge, David Hare, Howard Jacobson, Jackie Kay, Kate Tempest, Sebastian Barry, Shakespeare, Tracy Chevalier

There are three wonderful literary festivals lined up this spring, at Cambridge, Oxford and Charleston (the great Bloomsbury house near Lewes in Sussex).  Lots of authors to see and listen to, and buy books from – and other famous names from the media and other worlds are on show too.

The Cambridge Literary Festival – 5-14 April

The website (http://www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com ) says, “This year’s eclectic and vibrant line-up is bigger than ever and presents leading lights from the worlds of comedy and current affairs, history and hip-hop, finance and fiction, science and Shakespeare and poetry and politics.”

The programme includes: Akala, Sebastian Barry, Tracy Chevalier, David Hare, Horrible Science, Howard Jacobson, Jackie Kay, Ken Livingstone, Ben Miller, Alexei Sayle, Andy Stanton, Kate Tempest, Edmund de Waal and Ruby Wax.

The Grantchester Mysteries Vol 4

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Cambridge, clergy, Grantchester, James Norton, James Runcie, Robson Green, Sidney Chambers, televisation

The fourth and latest in the series of The Grantchester Mysteries was launched at the Church House Bookshop in Westminster last week, on 19 May. It’s Sidney Chambers and The Forgiveness of Sins. It’s by James Runcie.

Like its three predecessors it has as its hero the Vicar of Grantchester, Sidney Chambers. Sensitive, likeable, with an MC (and traumatic memories) from WW2. This new volume consists of six stories, each self-contained: we see Sidney conscientiously carrying out his full-time parish ministry but also fitting in the solving of mysteries. The Forgiveness of Sins takes us from 1964 to 1966. As before we are still largely in the Grantchester and Cambridge setting.

At the launch James Runcie told us that his intention in writing the Grantchester Mysteries series was to explore the social history of Britain between 1953 and 1979, a period of enormous social change. The crime genre is a happy way of doing this and is, of course, highly popular at the moment. He speculated on whether the present-day appeal of the crime genre relates in some way to our squeamishness about death: it is no longer ever-present in daily life as it was in times past, and crime fiction provided us with one way of handling its mystery and issues of loss.

When creating Sidney Chambers the author had wanted to get away from the comic or foolish clergyman so often portrayed in the media, away from Derek Nimmo or Dick Emery caricatures and their modern equivalents. He has certainly succeeded in that. In answer to one question he told us that when writing Sidney he does not have in mind James Norton (who plays him in the TV series Grantchester), though when composing DI Keating, with whom Sidney collaborates when solving his mysteries, he now does so with actor Robson Green’s voice in his head. Sidney is a composite of various clergy James Runcie has come across, and the author’s upbringing was such that he came across more clergymen than most.

I’m much looking forward to reading The Forgiveness of Sins. The previous volumes are Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death, SC & The Perils of the Night, and SC & The Problem of Evil. They are published by Bloomsbury. The ISBN of SC & The Forgiveness of Sins is 978-1-4088-6220-9 and its hardback RRP is £14-99.

The photo shows James Runcie at the book launch.