If you haven’t booked tickets to our event (as part of Writing West Midlands), An Evening of Persian Poetry which is taking place on Wednesday 9th May at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham; here is your chance to win pair of tickets!

All you have to do is head to our Facebook page and click ‘like’- the one thousandth person to like our page will win two tickets worth £10 each!

You can also search for us on Facebook (Birmingham Book Festival)

For more information about the event which is part of the Poetry Translation Centre’s Persian Poets’ Tour please visit the event page on Writing West Midlands’ website http://www.writingwestmidlands.org/2012/02/28/an-evening-of-persian-poetry/

The Birmingham Book Festival is a project of Writing West Midlands, the literature development agency for the West Midlands region.

Our third and second to last Tell Me On A Sunday is about to start,  and  the Ikon cafe is filling up quickly. This event is proving so popular that we’re turning people away. If you’re planning on coming to the last one on May 27th, make sure you book to get a table, even if you’re not planning to order food from the lovely Ikon Cafe.

Tonight’s storytellers are: Gauri Raje, Ryan Jones, Polly Tisdall, David Howat, Cath Edwards and Helen Watson. The evening is curated by the national storytelling laureate, Katrice Horsley, who is also telling her own story. Tonight’s theme is Feathers and Bones and we can’t wait to hear what comes  out.

More later…

We are pleased to announce that the winners of the Birmingham Book Festival Short Story Competition are:

Overall Winner: Richard Stokes for Wheel On The Wall
Second Prize winner: Victoria Grainger for The Temporal Hours of Verge Foliot
Runners up: Claire Bennett for Twelve Minutes on Gas Mark Six and Matthew Storer for A Stopped Clock.

The winning stories will be published on our website soon.

All four of the winners will be reading their short stories at our Short Story Competition Celebratory Reception on Thursday 19th April, 6.45pm – 8pm at Toye, Kenning & Spencer, 77 Warstone Lane, Birmingham, B18 6NL. The winner and two runners up will join judge Judith Allnatt to share their stories and receive their prizes.

This event is free to attend but places are limited, so please book via our online Box Office by clicking here.

We know you have a story in you. Unleash it. Conjure a memory, recent or ancient, good or bad.

Tell it to yourself, re-tell it, hone it, cut it, embellish it.  Pitch it to us. Get on stage and tell it.

Ikon, in collaboration with the Birmingham Book Festival presents a new series of free literary events. Hosted in Café Ikon, Tell Me On A Sunday is storytelling from life. Participants tell stories based around a specially selected theme, all with truth (and a good performance!) at their heart.
Each month, five storytellers will be chosen to perform a seven minute story live.

The events feature special guests and are curated by Cat Weatherill, one of Europe’s leading performance storytellers, who will also tell her own story. Originally championed by the Hay Festival, Cat has been creating and telling tales to adults and children for twelve years. She is also a best selling author, with books translated into nine languages.

The dates of these events are:

Sunday 19 February
Theme: Off the beaten track

Sunday 25 March
Theme: Hope and glory

Sunday 22 April
Theme: Feathers and bones

Sunday 27th May
Theme: Secrets & Lies

All events running from 4pm – 6.30pm  and are FREE

Events begin at 4pm with Story Supper, a chance to meet fellow audience members and story tellers over a special Café Ikon menu (contact Ikon for prices). Performances commence at 5pm, finishing at 6.30pm.

Please note these events are intended for adult audiences. Places are free but should be reserved by calling Ikon on 0121 248 0708.

How to pitch your story:

Please visit the event page to see full details of how to pitch your own story and guidelines.

Tuesday 21st February

The Roundabout Man by Clare Morrall

7pm – 8.30pm/ Free Event

Ikon Gallery
1 Oozells Square
Birmingham, B1 2HS

Sceptre and Writing West Midlands are delighted to invite you to celebrate the publication of the new novel from Clare Morrall, The Roundabout Man.

Who is The Roundabout Man? He doesn’t look like a tramp, yet he lives on a roundabout in a caravan and survives on the leftovers from a nearby motorway service station. He calls himself Quinn, the name of a boy in a world-famous series of children’s books, but he’s nearer retirement than childhood.

What he hopes no one will discover is that he’s the real Quinn, immortalised as a child by his mother in her entrancing tales about a little boy’s adventures with his triplet sisters. It is this inheritance he has successfully run away from- until now. When Quinn’s reclusive existence is invaded, he is forced to face his past, and the uncomfortable truths and secrets it contains about himself, his sisters and, most of all, his mother.

This event includes a reading and book signing.

How to book:

Places are free but should be reserved by calling Ikon on 0121 248 0708.

It is the end of another lovely festival, and we are fast collating all the images, reviews and articles we want to share with you, via this site, Facebook, Twitter and our Blog.

Thank you to everyone who attended an event or supported us in any way. We enjoy each and every event and love meeting our audience.

Please continue to visit this site to keep up to date with our forthcoming events and activities.

Thanks for a great festival!

Here’s a look at what we’ve been getting up to at the Festival so far. There are more pictures over at our Facebook page, too.

Last Thursday, National Poetry Day, we launched the Festival…..

and helped Birmingham Libraries announce the new Birmingham Poet Laureate, Jan Watts.

Yumm Cafe in Digbeth hosted our lovely launch party and quiz, chaired by charming, funny poet Matt Harvey, who also entertained us with a few poems and got to know the 2010-11 Poet Laureate, Roy McFarlane, who also shared some words with the waiting crowd!

 Roy, assuring us there are ‘bikes, bikes everywhere…’ in Amsterdam.

On Friday, we joined Tindal Street Press for the launch of their new anthology, Too Asian, Not Asian Enough, at Ikon Gallery.

 Thanks to Ikon for the gorgeous backdrop!

After Tindal Street, we met writer Ian Leslie, who, in conversation with head of the new Library of Birmingham project Brian Gambles, shared with us the thinking behind his books, Born Liars. We all are, in turns out, but don’t worry, it’s okay… with special thanks to the RSA for co-presenting this event.

Saturday was our book fair for independent presses, States of Independence (West), at Eastside Projects in Digbeth.

After a very early start the presses got down to some serious bookselling, and a programme of brief readings and seminars went on throughout the day.

There was soup and cake, too…

On Monday,we were delighted to join The Writers’ Guild in presenting  ‘Developing Writers with the BBC’ featuring the BBC Writersroom’s Paul Ashton.

Amongst these events a Fringe festival has been happening in and around the Festival Bookshop, featuring everything from drop in sessions with the Book Doctors to events with authors, including Edmund Bealby-Wright and Linda Green. Today favourite poems were shared with new Birmingham Poet Laureate Jan Watts.

So much more to come!! Keep checking our facebook page, our Blog, which contains some great reviews of the events we’ve enjoyed so far, and of course book your tickets for everything still to come!

In anticipation of the forthcoming Birmingham Food Fest, which overlaps with us by a few days, Radar Magazine asked Festival Director Sara Beadle to get thinking about the relationship between food and fiction.

Here, Sara shares with Radar’s readers six of her favourite Foodie fiction moments. Yummy.

Food & Fiction

Here is the Birmingham Post’s Interview with Will Self, ahead of his event on Thursday 13th October.

Image: Polly Boland

A huge well done to all those who braved, and survived, Saturday’s all night writing workshop.

The fourth of these we have run, it is so pleasing to see that people still have the desire and courage to experiment with their creativity in this way.

From 11pm to 5am we wrote, drank coffee, snacked on unhealthy sugary things and wandered inquisitively around the warren of warehouses and stores that make up the Museum Collections Centre in Birmingham. 

It was a long night, but a staggering experience to be surrounded by artefacts as eclectically arranged as these, many of which originate from the West Midlands.

Over on our October Festival Blog, our student journalists are beginning the long process of writing this up, with more detailed interviews, images and examples of creative writing to follow.

Here, on our Facebook Page, you can view a gallery of images of the night’s activities. You can also look back over our twitter feed for snippets of information and pictures posted as we went along.

You can also catch a piece about the workshop on BBC Midlands Today on Monday 3 October 2011 at 1.30pm and 6.30pm.