1. Waitrose Bag – My tent
Let me explain, for a free ticket and free food I am collecting rubbish at Glastonbury. I’ve done it before, it’s everything you imagine and more and less and blimey what’s that? Continue reading
Human towers rise as the Castellers de Vilafranca perform at Salisbury International Arts Festival
4 JunHuman towers rose up in front of England’s tallest spire at the weekend, as the daredevil Castellers de Vilafranca wowed crowds at the Salisbury International Arts Festival.
In one of those quirky traditions that goes back 300 years, the performers climbed onto the shoulders of the stronger members to build towers stacked six-people high, with the smallest, lightest Castellers – the youngest was just six years old – balancing what we estimate to be a vertigo-inducing 30 feet above the crowds. Continue reading
Upfest answers the old question: graffiti – art or vandalism?
27 MayWhy Join Art School When You Can be a Vandal? That’s the tongue-in-cheek question posed by one of the artists at Bristol’s Upfest, Europe’s largest urban paint festival.
Finale words and flutes and double bass
18 May
Swindon Festival of Literature reached its climax at the Town Hall with the annual Poems and Pints event. Continue reading
Bell chimes workshop rhymes
18 May
Jo Bell Workshop
Workshops, full of anvils, lathes and maybe a vice or two, unless it’s the last day of the twentieth Swindon Festival of Literature when it’s something else entirely. Continue reading
Outskirts of Swindon
17 May
Fiona Sampson
Internationally acclaimed poet Fiona Sampson showcased her book. ‘Coleshill’ at the Arts Centre Studio. Continue reading
Cherries As Insurgent Art
16 May
Mabel’s House
Domestic Cherry’s Swindon Festival Of Literature residency continued at Artsite Post Modern as Mabel Watson threw one of her infamous house parties. Continue reading
Genetically Modified Truths
15 May
Steve Jones
‘Just in case there are any people down from London for the day I’ll translate the Latin because I know that the highly educated people of Swindon won’t need me to’. Continue reading
The Magic of Listening
14 May
Ben Okri
Writer Ben Okri talks in poetry,
especially when talking of poetry,
‘the very nature of it is wild,
all poetry is spiritual’.
But Okri also considers poetry so powerful
that we have to be careful with it.
Tyrants have been known to be poets
bad poets.
We are walking amongst monsters
these flowers
are protection against evil.
Follow the song.
Poetry wants nothing from you but
cascades of sound.
Make our hearts a festival.
We live in a story shaped world – CS Lewis
13 May
C.S.Lewis – a life by Alister McGrath
A week of the Swindon Festival of Literature has gone by and it’s at about this time that frazzled Festival types starting running out of sleep and clothes to wear, today the search for a clean T-shirt brought a lengthy, fruitless search in the bedroom, it wasn’t there of course, maybe my tired brain was lying about which wardrobe. Continue reading
Festival Chronicle 