Yellow Zebra ©Calyx
Trembling With Confidence ©Calyx
Chronicler Milo (9) reports from Swindon’s teenage poetry competition, Youth Slam.
Tag Archives: literature
‘I once saw one carrying a segment of Terry’s Chocolate Orange’
6 May
Amy Liptrot has provided me with my favourite line from any book I have read this year as she recalled her wild life in London Fields and the wildlife of Orkney.
Using her return to the remote Scottish islands following a three-month spell in rehab as the segment of her life to tap and unwrap in a memoir, Liptrop was an engagingly awkward presence at the Arts Centre. Continue reading
Sitting in Kipling’s bath
6 May©Calyx Mary Hamer at Swindon festival of Literature
If you can keep a shocking story going
when Kipling is as unfashionable as a punkhawalla in the drawing room,
If you can travel the world in pursuit of your story,
But maintain a love for your subject;
If you can wait ten years for the novel to come to fruition,
Or uncover inequality, parental abandonment,
Or light a feminist torch for Kipling’s forgotten sibling,
And yet don’t moralise, nor impose twenty-first-century morals on the nineteenth:
Meeting Isy’s mad mother and Dom’s one-eyed cat
6 May Isy Suttie – no seriously http://www.claregreenphotography.com
Isy Suttie http://www.claregreenphotography.com
Dom Joly – whatcanIsay? http://www.claregreenphotography.com
Dom Joly – clown http://www.claregreenphotography.com
Comedy night at Swindon Festival of Literature – the evening that gives your brain cells a chance to recover after events featuring deep thinkers and political heavyweights.
Preaching to the converted
3 May
Kaye Franklin would approve
3rd May 2016, Swindon Festival of Literature
The Kaye Franklin Memorial Lecture
In taking the phrase ‘preaching to the converted’ as the title of this post I’m leaping to the end of today’s lecture delivered by Matt Holland, at Swindon Arts Centre.
Having made his last point, Matt sat down in readiness for the Q&A session, looked out at the audience and observed a feeling of ‘foolishness’ at having spent 30/40 minutes talking about the role of literature in life to a crowd of people who almost certainly believe that there is a role and a purpose to literature – because why else would they have been in that lecture? QED?
So did Matt need to feel foolish? Is there a role for literature in life? And if so – what is it? Continue reading
Foxes are the champions
2 MayOn a night when the ‘Foxes’ of Leicester City won the Premier League at the expense of the cockerel crested Spurs, debating the fox and his many guises seemed appropriate, especially as the event took place at Lower Shaw Farm.
Chickens were conspicuous by their absence, perhaps taking the hint from the signage chalked across their usual pecking ground.
So, Fantastic Mr. Fox or ginger vermin?
Lucy Jones explores every side of this complex creature in her book Foxes Unearthed – A story of love and loathing in modern Britain.
Speaking in a former cowshed on an award-winning urban farm, Jones was in the perfect place to expand on the countryside vs. city paradox which sees foxes fed at back-doors by ‘townies’ but shot or hunted in the countryside.
Jones made it clear that Mr. Fox is both hero and the villain, and has been so since he slunk into mankind’s chicken cave centuries ago.
A keen audience of first-night festival-goers heard the wildly differing points of view of the hunting fraternity, angry saboteurs, curly haired pomp-rock guitarists and chicken-less farmers. Continue reading
The best PM Britain never had – Alan Johnson at Swindon Festival of Literature
16 May
Mark O’Donnell in conversation with Alan Johnson
Alan Johnson has had a bad week. Labour lost the election, his beloved Queen’s Park Rangers were relegated, and he discovered that his new next door neighbour in the Houses of Parliament offices is Alex Salmond.
Strange bedfellows II – AC Grayling and Rory Bremner at Swindon Festival of Literature
14 MayA couple of nights ago we had our first comedy / thinky mash-up with Helen Lederer and Peter Tatchell. And last night, we enjoyed an equally unlikely billing – a double-header with philosopher A.C. Grayling and impressionist Rory Bremner. Continue reading
Switching off the brain? No chance! Children’s Day at Swindon Festival of Literature
10 MayBy the mid-point of the Swindon Festival of Literature, my brain can usually do with a good rest.
The organisers work us Festival-goers hard: getting up up before sunrise on day 1 for the Dawn Chorus, then making us think, and be creative, and think some more for the next six days. Continue reading
Vanessa LaFaye – English v American market at Swindon Festival of Literature
9 MayThe sticky subject of simplifying modern literature for an American audience was discussed during an interview with author Vanessa LaFaye on Friday.
Sticky, because Vanessa is an American living in the Wiltshire. And sticky, because the author is being forced to choose between her preferred nuances within the novel, and commercial success in the US market. Continue reading
Festival Chronicle 