©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:
Festival Chronicle 