book
Panel: The New Optimists
1 year ago
Saturday 9th April 2011
The New Optimists: Professor Hazel Barrett,Professor Gina Rippon and Dr Stuart Slater.
£6.50/£5 / 4pm / Arena Foyer, Birmingham Conservatoire, Paradise Place, Birmingham B3 3HG
Nick Booth (www.Podnosh.com) chairs a panel of contributors to the popular book The New Optimists – Geographer Professor Hazel Barrett, Neuroscientist Professor Gina Rippon and expert in Artificial Intelligence & Games Development Dr Stuart Slater. Their task: to interrogate what the future holds for us.
The New Optimists are lots of scientists (over 80 to date), a loose collection of non-scientists who are good at making things happen, plus a book, a website, some events — and profits from the sale of any of these activities will be used to fund young scientists. The idea was spawned by Kate Cooper in early 2009 when she asked lots of scientists the simple John Brockman question “What are you optimistic about?” Over 80 responded, and what they’ve said has been compiled into this book The New Optimists: Scientists view tomorrow’s world & what it means to us. This book was launched in September 2010 through a multimedia venture set up for the purpose, Linus Publishing.
Read more about The New Optimists and it’s contributors at their website, or follow them on twitter (@newoptimists)
Supported by The New Optimists.
Book Online or call 0844 870 0000
Panel: Turning History Into Story – Guy Saville, Saul David and Gaynor Arnold
1 year ago
The Festival regrets that this event has been cancelled.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. If you have a ticket to this event, you can obtain a refund by contacting The Ticketsellers on 0844 870 0000 or you can exchange this ticket at the Spring Thing for another ticket to another event of the same value (subject to availability).
Books by these authors will still be available in the Festival Bookshop.
Saturday 9th April 2011
Panel: Turning History Into Story – Guy Saville, Saul David and Gaynor Arnold
£6.50/£5 / 12pm / Recital Hall, Birmingham Conservatoire, Paradise Place, Birmingham B3 3HG
Historian and broadcaster Saul David and historical novelists Guy Saville and Gaynor Arnold come together to talk about the process of turning dates and facts into creative narrative.
Saul David is the author of several critically-acclaimed history books, including The Indian Mutiny: 1857 (shortlisted for the Westminster Medal for Military Literature), Zulu: the Heroism and Tragedy of the Zulu War of 1879 (a Waterstone’s Military History Book of the Year) and, most recently, Victoria’s Wars: The Rise of Empire. His latest work of history – Soldiers: The British Redcoat from the Glorious Revolution to Waterloo – will be published by Penguin in February 2012.
Saul has also written two historical novels, set during the wars of the late Victorian period and featuring the Anglo-African soldier George Hart. The first, Zulu Hart, was published l
ast year. Praised by Bernard Cornwell and Conn Iggulden, it was chosen as a Waterstone’s New Talent in Fiction title and reached No. 4 in the Daily Telegraph hardback fiction bestsellers (see Books for reviews). The follow up, Hart of Empire, was published on 5 August.
An experienced broadcaster, Saul has presented and appeared in history programmes for all the major TV channels and is a regular on Radio 4. He is Professor of War Studies at the University of Buckingham, and Programme Director for Buckingham’s London-based MA in Military History.
Guy Saville was born in 1973. He has lived in South America and North Africa. The Afrika Reich is his first novel – a high-octane thriller of alternate history that combines meticulous research with edge of the seat suspense. Others have imagined a Europe ruled by Hitler but never before have we seen his empire stretch beyond the equator. Written with a cinematic sense of action, the book takes the conventions of the men-on-a-mission story and turns them on their head. It delivers more than just a page-turning plot. A rich cast of characters gives the narrative real emotional depth. This is a human story of love, revenge and the battle for Africa.
The research for the book has taken Guy Saville to the Nazis’ actual plans for Africa, the weaponry they were developing and declassified British intelligence documents. Real life historical figures appear with fictional characters to build a thoroughly convincing account of how the world might have been.
Please note that this event previously listed Robyn Young as a participant. Unfortunately Robyn is no longer able to take part. We are delighted that Tindal Street’s Gaynor Arnold is able to join this panel.
Gaynor Arnold was born and brought up in Cardiff, and was an au pair in Paris before reading English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is married, with two grown-up children and currently works for Birmingham’s Adoption & Fostering Service. She is a member of a writer’s group and has had several short stories published in magazines and anthologies. Girl in a Blue Dress is her first novel. It was longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2008, the Orange Broadband Prize 2009, and the Desmond Elliott Prize 2009, and was shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize 2009. Her short story collection, Lying Together, was published by Tindal Street Press in February 2011.
More information about Gaynor and her writing here
With thanks to Hodder and Stoughton and Tindal Street Press.
Book Online or call 0844 870 0000
Workshop: Truth, Lies & Life Writing – Candi Miller
1 year ago
Saturday 9th April 2011
Workshop: Truth, Lies & Life Writing – Candi Miller
£23/17 / Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library, Paradise Place, Birmingham B3 3HQ
A writing workshop which considers the impossibility of truth when writing your or someone else’s life – and encourages you to do it anyway. You will engage in writing activities designed to help develop vivid recall so you can power your life-writing. With novelist Candi Miller (Salt and Honey)
Book Online or call 0844 870 0000
David Lodge: Launching A Man Of Parts
1 year ago
Saturday 9th April 2011
David Lodge: Launching A Man Of Parts
£6.50 /£5 /7.30pm/ Recital Hall, Birmingham Conservatoire, Paradise Place, Birmingham B3 3HG
Sponsored by Harvill Secker.
David Lodge is a novelist, critic, and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught for many years, taking early retirement in 1987 to write full-time.
His new novel, A Man of Parts, is his fifteenth work of fiction. Others include Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1988), all of which are set partly in “Rummidge,” a mythical version of Birmingham, where he continues to live. He has won several prizes and awards, including the Hawtherndon Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize for Changing Places, the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award for Nice Work and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for How Far Can You Go? (1980). Both Small World and Nice Work were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. David Lodge adapted Nice Work and Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit as television serials for the BBC, produced at Pebble Mill in 1989 and 1994 respectively. More recent novels include Therapy (1995), Thinks…(2001), Author, Author (2004), and Deaf Sentence (2008) His stage plays The Writing Game (1990) and Home Truths (1998) were premiered at the Birmingham Rep, and a new play, Secret Thoughts, based on the novel Thinks… will be premiered at the Bolton Octagon in May of this year. He is the author of numerous works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel, and The Year of Henry James. In 1998 he was awarded the CBE for services to literature.
A Man of Parts, is about H.G.Wells. As the second war he has lived through moves into its final phase, the ailing “H.G.” loo
ks back on a life crowded with incident, books, and women. David Lodge achieves a riveting portrait of a remarkable man who embodied as many contradictions as he had talents: a socialist who enjoyed his affluence, an acclaimed novelist who turned against the literary novel, a feminist womaniser, sensual yet incurably romantic, irresistible and exasperating by turns to those who knew him personally, but always vitally human.
Join us in celebrating the publication of this latest work with David.
Book Online or call 0844 870 0000
Cake & Crime: Sophie Hannah
1 year ago
Saturday 9th April 2011
Cake & Crime: Sophie Hannah
2pm – 3.15pm / £8 & £6 (includes refreshments)/ Recital Hall, Birmingham Conservatoire, Paradise Place, Birmingham B3 3HG
Celebrating the publication of her sixth psychological crime thriller Lasting Damage, and the forthcoming ITV dramatisation of an earlier novel in the same series, Point of Rescue, Sophie comes to Birmingham to eat yummy cake and talk about her writing career so far.
About Lasting Damage
It`s 1.15 a.m. Connie Bowskill should be asleep. Instead, she`s logging on to a property website in search of a particular house: 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge. She knows it`s for sale; she saw the estate agent`s board in the front garden less than six hours ago.
Soon Connie is clicking on the `Virtual Tour` button, keen to see the inside of 11 Bentley Grove and put her mind at rest once and for all. She finds herself looking at a scene from a nightmare: in the living room, in the middle of the carpet, there`s a woman lying face down in a huge pool of blood. In shock, Connie wakes her husband Kit. But when Kit sits down at the computer to take a look, he sees no dead body, only a pristine beige carpet in a perfectly ordinary room…
Sophie Hannah is the author of five internationally bestselling psychological thrillers – Little Face, Hurting Distance, The Point of Rescue, The Other Half Lives and A Room Swept White. Her novels are published in 20 countries, with more foreign rights deals under negotiation. The Other Half Lives was shortlisted for the 2010 Independent Booksellers’ Book of the Year Award. Little Face and Hurting Distance were both longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, and Little Face was longlisted for the IMPAC Award. The Point of Rescue is currently being made for television, and will appear on ITV1 in 2011. Lasting Damage is the sixth novel in this series.
Sophie has also published five collections of poetry. Her fifth, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot Award. Her poetry is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and between 1999 and 2001 she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She is thirty-nine and lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children, where she is Fellow Commoner at Lucy Cavendish College.
Join us for lots of cake and coffee and the chance to hear Sophie talk about her work. Questions welcome!
With thanks to Hodder and Stoughton
Book Online or call 0844 870 0000
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Teenage Writers Workshop: David Calcutt
1 year ago
by Birmingham Book Festival
in april 2011, birmingham, book, Events, family, festival, News, spring, spring thing, teenagers, workshop, writing
Saturday 9th April 2011
Teenage Writers Workshop: David Calcutt
£9 / 11.30am – 1.15pm / Centre For The Child, Birmingham Central Library, Birmingham B3 3HQ
Come and explore creative writing with novelist David Calcutt - No experience needed!
David Calcutt writes plays, poetry and novels for young adults, runs workshops and works in schools.
This workshop will allow you to explore your interest in creative writing in a friendly and supportive environment.
Suitable for ages 14-19.
In association with:
Book Online or call 0844 870 0000
Review – The Free World by David Bezmozgis
1 year ago
The first novel by Canadian David Bezmozgis, is a well structured tale of immigration and displacement in the holding bays of 1970′s Rome. The Free World follows The Krasnansky family -three generations of them- who are escaping Communism (some more willingly than others), lured by the promise of a new life in the USA by way of a short stop off in a cramped, dirty pensione in Rome.
At the mercy of a distantly related sponsor in Chicago, they wait, until inevitably they are informed that they aren’t headed for America after all. The family are then forced to join the masses of immigrants awaiting visas, facing humiliating medicals and trivial obstructions from those holding the forms, unable to agree on their destination even within their own ranks.
Elderly Samuil longs to return to his Soviet homeland and finds no comfort in the alien streets and language of the Italian city. Withdrawing from his wife and sons, he takes comfort only in memories of his life in Riga, Latvia, and the Red Army for which he would still happily give his life. His son Alec, whose gleeful womanizing has landed him in a precarious young marriage to a woman who has left everything behind to follow him, is still playing with fire. Alec’s brother, Karl, dives straight in to the shadier side of immigrant life in Rome, and his wife, Rosa, who promptly enrolls her two children in Hebrew classes, is set on resettling in Israel. Samuil’s wife, Emma, grasps at the straws of a family life as they struggle to decide where now they should head. This question resurfaces time and again until, absurdly, the adults find themselves huddled in a stairwell, against the clock, having to tick off the options on their fingers and make a choice.
I read this mostly on a series of long train journeys, rather aptly. Speeding through stations as the characters do, trekking back and forth across the sprawling acres of Rome that separate their rented accomodation, work (for some) and the offices of the immigration authorities that they ritually attend for hope of success. The book gives a different view of this ancient city, too – this is not the classical, clean tourist haven of film and television, but hot and dirty streets full of the signs of overcrowding and poverty synonymous with its temporary communities.
In short, it is a generous book - several unusual settings (I’ve never been to Latvia – have you?) more than a handful of well drawn characters, and so much icy tension between members of the family at times that your head aches with trying to imagine it all working out well. It emits a clear sense of longing, too - for direction, for lovers, for the past, and for a place to call home, whatever that means.
The Free World is published by Penguin, in April 2011.
(More reviews soon – I have a deliciously – albeit alarmingly – tall pile of proofs and review copies for new and soon-to-be-released books – some of which I hope will end up in the Festivals of 2011 – watch this space…)
Win Tickets to the Spring Thing!
2 years ago
Want to win a pair of tickets to the Spring Thing? Fifty words or less on a book/short story/poem/collection/show you’ve read/seen and loved by one of the day’s writers – see
http://www.birminghambookfestival.org/events-2010/spring-thing-more-details for the full list. Send it to sara[at]birminghambookfestival[dot]org …by 5pm Friday 30 April 2010, with your name and email address. Good luck!
Christine Coleman Book Launch
2 years ago
Tuesday 27 April 2010 : A Launch Event for Christine Coleman’s new novel, Paper Lanterns. In conversation with Clarissa Dickson-Wright, Christine will read from her new book and talk about the ideas behind it.
Venue: The Ikon Gallery, 1 Oozells Square, Birmingham B1 2HS
Time: 6.45pm
Tickets: Free but please reserve via Sara Beadle on 0121 246 2792 or sara[at]birminghambookfestival[dot]org
