publishing
The Spring Thing is nearly here
10 months ago
by Birmingham Book Festival
in alys fowler, april 2011, audio installation, birmingham, book, books, cake, candi miller, comedy, crime fiction, david lodge, editing, festival, fiction, gardening, helen calcutt, historical fiction, library, life writing, literature events, new voices, News, novel, panel discussion, performance, pigeons, poetry, publishing, readings and discussion, sophie hannah, spring, spring thing, sustainability, the writing squads, tindal street press, writing, writing west midlands
We are very excited here. It is less than two weeks until we enjoy two whole days of books, writers, chatting about books and writers, sharing ideas, networking, workshops, and of course a few quirky things too.
Coming up next week:
On Friday 8th April, the BBF team will be out and about in the city, at Birmingham Cathedral and Birmingham Library, asking you to get involved in a writing installation. So if you see us, stop by and say hello! We *might* be carrying chocolate…
Give & Take is a new feature of the Festival, too. It’s simple – you bring along to events any books you no longer want, and donate them to the G&T bin. You are then welcome to help yourself to a book from the bin.
Anticipation is building…
The event most people seem to be talking about is Project Pigeon’s writing workshop – in their actual pigeon loft in Digbeth. Far from being a cold and unwelcoming space, this is a friendly, informative, enlightening place where the project’s curators, Alex and Ian, are eager to talk to people about the pursuit of social change they are on, (and introduce us to the baby pigeons they’ve hatched this month). A place full of story and history, atmosphere and personality, inspiration will not be hard to come by.
We’re also getting excited about the fantastic John Hegley, who will be making us laugh and think on Sunday evening and closing the festival is style. That’s right after we celebrate the third birthday of indpendent press Nine Arches with readings from several of their poets . That’s a whole night of excellent poetry, cake and conversation.
Launching The Daily Spring Thing
To celebrate the Spring Thing, and the rich literary fabric here in Birmingham, we are launching The Birmingham Book Festival Newspaper. This is a free paper that will be published every day during both Festivals of the year. So, in preparation for the Spring Thing, issue one is ready. In it you will find plenty of information about events, advice on planning your weekend depending on your writing/reading interests, and yes, there is even a gossip column. Heaven knows what’ll go in that…
Spring Thing Newspaper Issue One
Issue Two will be published on the morning of the Saturday of the Spring Thing, and will be packed with information about the weekend ahead. It will include, among other things, an interview with crime writer Sophie Hannah, who is joining us on Saturday to eat cake and talk about the messy business of writing about murder and mystery.
Now to choose the cake…
Writer Networking Meeting
11 months ago
Sunday April 10th 2011
Writer Networking Meeting
Free! No need to book / 2-3.15pm / Seminar Room, Birmingham Conservatoire, Paradise Place, Birmingham B3 3HG
Guest Speaker: Stuart Evers.
Are you a writer living or working in the West Midlands? Come along and meet others, drink tea and discuss ideas. Stuart Evers is a former editor and bookseller turned fiction writer.
You can access his blog at the link above, or follow him on twitter, @stuartevers.
With thanks to Writing West Midlands.
The Birthday Party – Nine Arches Press are 3!
11 months ago
Sunday April 10th 2011
The Birthday Party – Nine Arches Press are 3!
£6.50/£5 / 5.45pm / Recital Hall, Birmingham Conservatoire, Paradise Place, Birmingham B3 3HG
Celebrate the third birthday of West Midlands-based independent poetry press, Nine Arches Press, with a special showcase of their most recent poets and publications. Since 2008, they have published 16 collections, 7 copies of Under the Radar magazine, and gained 4 national and regional prizenominations. They also run events, workshops, open mics and readings.
Join poets Myra Connell, Luke Kennard, Ruth Larbey and Claire Crowther to blow out the candles! (www.ninearchespress.com)
CLAIRE CROWTHER
Claire Crow
ther’s two collections, Stretch of Closures and The Clockwork Gift (Shearsman Books), have been received with wide acclaim, and have been followed up be her Nine Arches Press pamphlet, Mollicle. She was born and grew up in Hobs Moat near Solihull. Mollicle is zesty, mysterious and mischievous, the ordinary world turned kaleidoscopic and rearranged in Crowther’s distinct and elegant fashion.
ther’s two collections, Stretch of Closures and The Clockwork Gift (Shearsman Books), have been received with wide acclaim, and have been followed up be her Nine Arches Press pamphlet, Mollicle. She was born and grew up in Hobs Moat near Solihull. Mollicle is zesty, mysterious and mischievous, the ordinary world turned kaleidoscopic and rearranged in Crowther’s distinct and elegant fashion. Praise for Mollicle:
“Claire Crowther’s work is wittily compelling, a complex music. Poems by Crowther are events. With equal power, Mollicle reflects the outer world and the mind’s life, intensely illuminated.
day and night, repay your loan:
shine with sun’s compulsive light. ”
- Alison Brackenbury
“Claire Crowther’s poems employ what seems to be a singular form of logic – each one is like a mirror she has handed you in which you see something familiar, yet in a way you hadn’t managed to see before.”
– Roddy Lumsden
RUTH LARBEY
Ruth Larbey was born in Cyprus, and grew up in Nottingham, Hong Kong and rural Cumbria. She has spent her last two years working at an international development charity in London, after completing her MA at Warwick University in 2008. Funglish is her debut pamphlet of poems, and is a maiden voyage alive with the simple thrill of exploration, re-imagining liminal spaces into new territories vibrant with possibility.
Praise for Funglish
“There’s a drastic incandescence to Ruth Larbey’s syntax which pulls you into her poetry. Writing with an edgy control reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, her poems create exacting ‘electric constellations’ of vision and nerve in which no word is wasted, no darkness left unexplored. As Dickinson wrote, ‘A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.’ Ruth Larbey’s language is alive and gravid.” - David Morley
LUKE KENNARD
Luke Kennard won an Eric Gregory award in 2005 for his first collection of prose poems The Solex Brothers (Stride Books). His second collection of poetry The Harbour Beyond the Movie was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2007 making him the youngest poet ever to be nominated for the award. His criticism has appeared in Poetry London and The T
imes Literary Supplement. He is currently reviewing fiction for The National.
Luke Kennard’s Planet-Shaped Horse is an unhinged black-comedy poem-play from one of contemporary poetry’s most unique voices. Both terrible and beautiful things happen. Hermits and doctors are not what they seem and neither Miranda nor Simon seem capable of reining in or reforming their unreliable narrator…
Praise for Luke Kennard:
His language is exciting and it feels to me that he’s a truly 21st-century writer, taking inspiration from all over the place, unafraid of barriers and conventions. – Ian McMillan, The Times
Inventive, academically aware, fearless and hugely enjoyable.
– Nick Laird, The Telegraph
Luke Kennard writes vibrant, original poems that stick in your mind for a long time and enliven your imagination.
- Sophie Hannah
MYRA CONNELL
Myra Connell’s second collection of poems, From the Boat, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2010. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, and her short stories in two collections from Tindal Street Press, Her Majesty and Are You She?
She lives in Birmingham and has two grown-up sons.
From the Boat comes from a time of waiting, of mourning, and of finding small consolations. They are, many of them, small poems, the opposite of heroic. Bare, spare in mood, and exploring a sense of dislocation and disorientation, they look coldly at what is left when almost everything is pared away.
Myra Connell’s poetry is measured yet generous; experimental and adventurous; sharp, often angry, and yet tender.
BOOK ONLINE or call 0844 870 0000
Panel: The New Optimists
11 months 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
David Lodge: Launching A Man Of Parts
12 months 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
12 months 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
Join Michael Thomas and Roz Goddard in launching their new poetry collections
1 year ago
Details of a Birmingham poetry launch you might like…
Birmingham Launch: The Sopranos Sonnets & Other Poems and Port Winston Mulberry
Roz Goddard & Michael Wyndham Thomas
Thursday 15th July from 7.30pm – 9.00pm.
The Priory Rooms, Bull Street, Birmingham, B4 6AF.
FREE Entry
Celebrate the Launch of two brand new poetry collections from Nine Arches Press and Littlejohn & Bray, with readings from Roz Goddard and Michael Wyndham Thomas.
About Roz Goddard’s The Sopranos Sonnets & Other Poems:
Roz Goddard’s The Sopranos Sonnets & Other Poems is acutely observed, streetwise and bittersweet. At its heart are ten sonnet-portraits inspired by the television series about a dysfunctional mafia boss and his family. Among the cast of characters is Gloria, the hauntingly-seductive mistress with a built-in self-destruct button, and Leotardo, ready to murder at the drop of a letter…
This pamphlet will be available as a standard pamphlet, but also as a signed limited-edition pamphlet in a print run of 100 copies only.
About Michael Wyndham Thomas’s latest poetry collection, Port Winston Mulberry from Littlejohn & Bray:
Mulberries was the name of the artificial harbours used for the D-Day landings in June, 1944. The title poem of the collection, Port Winston Mulberry highlights one of Michael Wyndham Thomas’s abiding interests: giving voice to anonymous witnesses when history throws a fit. But this is just one strand in his latest collection. Reflections on how relationships are (or ought to be); observations of the passing human scene; the light and shade of memory; even commemorations of a father’s lethal choice of van–all of these and more find voice in a collection as varied in mood and form as in subject. ‘My dad drove vans,’ declares the opening poem. Michael Wyndham Thomas drives in all directions and returns with much to report.
New books and ideas for 2010.
2 years ago
Things are happening in the Book Festival offices. The general pace of things is go, go, go. Which, for January, is interesting.
Perhaps word has filtered through, perhaps not – we are changing slightly as an organisation in order to do more. As well as the Birmingham Book Festival we are now also the new literature development agency for the West Midlands, Writing West Midlands (WWM). Jonathan Davidson, previously Director of the Birmingham Book Festival (now Associate Director and Chief Executive of WWM) is focusing on WWM and Write On, the Festival’s education strand. This means that I am now focused solely on the Festival, and, as of January 2010, am full time – a whole five days a week to work on the Festival – a luxury.
I have been spending a lot of that time on the train, in meetings and on the internet finding out what is happening in the world of books and publishing in 2010. Here are a few of the (many) things that excite me:
New books for 2010 that I am already thinking about:
- Lionel Shriver’s new novel, So Much For That, is out in March.
- The Room Swept White is the latest from Sophie Hannah, also out in March.
- A second novel from Catherine O’Flynn to follow the brilliant What Was Lost comes our way in July.
- New Tindal Street titles including Maria Allen’s Before The Earthquake, in February, Lesley Glaister’s Chosen in May and Richard Francis’ The Old Spring in July.
- Clare Morrall’s fourth novel, The Man Who Disappeared, which we are launching on February 22nd, at the Electric Cinema, Birmingham, at 6.45pm. If you’d like to come, just email or call us (sara [at] birmingham book festival [dot] org, 0121 246 2792).
Look out for reviews and more information about these titles when they land on my desk, which I hope will be soon…
Add to this the heady combination of poet Jo Bell and novelist Jenn Ashworth, who are introducing a new show they like to call Too Much Information – a mix of short stories and poetry, wicked, wise and witty words about the bitter side of love, nightmare dates, friends and dead people, among other things…. knowing these two it promises to be dark, different and definitely funny. It will be part of our Spring Thing on Saturday May 29th, details of which will be appearing here in late February/early March.
Tomorrow I am off to London to meet with colleagues at the RSA, with whom the Festival has been happily working for several years now, to chat over ideas for 2010. It’s then on to Serpent’s Tail Publishers, who publish the excellent Bethan Roberts, Amanda Smyth and Aifric Campbell among others, to find out what they have to offer this year, and then along to Random House for an intensive two hour run through of their publishing calendar.
Come back here soon for reviews aplenty, including Raphael Selbourne’s Costa First Novel Award winning novel Beauty, and Fiona Shaw’s Tell It To The Bees.
Stay Well
Sara
