Tuesday 23 June, 8pm,  Norwich Arts Centre, tickets: £5 from NAC box office 01603 660352

An evening of words and music with some of the hottest young writers around.

Come and join us for an evening with Joe Dunthorne (Submarine), Jenn Ashworth (A Kind of Intimacy) and Chris Killen (The Bird Room) to mull over stories of love, loss and identity crises from debut novels that have been impressing critics and readers alike. The evening will be interspersed with acoustic sessions from the soulful voice of Girl in a Thunderbolt and Rory McVicar, (whose new album is out now).

About the  Writers

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne

“This first novel by a young Welsh poet is the sharpest, funniest, rudest account of a periodically troubled male teenager’s coming-of-age since The Catcher in the Rye… Submarine bristles with one-liners as 16-year-old Oliver dissects in his diary the lives of the adults living around him, in the manner of an anthropologist writing up a previously unknown tribe.”
Nicholas Tucker, The Independent

Joe Dunthorne

Joe Dunthorne’s debut novel, Submarine, won the Curtis Brown prize and was shortlisted for the Bollinger Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. It’s been translated in to six languages. His poetry has been published in various magazines, including Poetry Review, New Welsh Review and Magma, and he has written for The Independent and The Guardian. He has read his work on Channel 4, Radio 3 and Radio 4 and is a striker for the England Writers’ Football Team.

The Bird Room by Chris Killen

The Bird Room looks at the agony of true love and unfaithfulness, and will be published this spring. Canongate editor Francis Bickmore compares Killen’s writing to Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and says he “…had never read anything like Killen’s manuscript”.

Chris Killen

Chris Killen began writing at the age of 18, and secured a two-book publishing deal after a coincidental encounter with Canongate novelist Stephen Hall. He is a fiction editor at 3:AM magazine, has completed a 100-chapter ’supermarket nightmare’ novel as a ‘chapter a day’ blog, and won the 2007 Manchester Literarture Festival’s Blog Award. Chris’s second novel, Indoor Fireworks, is already well underway.  The story of his rise to fame was featured in October 2008’s edition of The Bookseller .

A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth

Jenni Diski hails ‘an intense and intriguing novel that never quite lets the reader get comfortable. It understands about the fuzzy boundary between the normal and the strange, and weaves them together in a gripping, ever-darkening narrative.’ The book follows Annie, a morbidly obese, lonely and hopeful girl. Asworth narrates her increasingly bizarre attempts to ingratiate herself with her new neighbours, to learn from past mistakes and achieve a ‘certain kind of intimacy’ with the boy next door.

A Kind of Intimacy

Jenn Ashworth

Jenn Ashworth signed with a literary agent shortly after graduating, and her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, is published this spring and is one of Waterstone’s New Voices. Jenn’s blog (www.jennashworth.blogspot.com) was awarded the prize for Best Writing on a Blog at the 2008 Manchester Literary Festival, and she also publishes short stories and collaborative fictions online, teaches creative writing for a local arts development company and works as a librarian in a prison.

About the Musicians

Rory McVicar

Rory McVicar

Wielding a guitar, his spellbinding voice, yearning lyrics and beautiful melodies mean than his 2007 debut album on Series 8 Records has been well received. Following appearances at Exit festival in Serbia and in the final of the Red Stripe Music Awards, 21 year old Norwich troubadour Rory McVicar He was selected out of hundreds of acts for the final six of the Music Week /Red Stripe Music Awards in May 07 and has supported Monkeys Swallows the Universe on two UK tours.
Rory on MySpace

Girl In A Thunderbolt

Girl in a Thunderbolt

Norwich based Girl in a Thunderbolt is actually a woman called Maria Uzor. Her songs are a celebration of music without any unnecessary pomp and ceremony, an uncanny mix of the minimal and the dark-hearted, wrapped tightly in a jagged electro-acoustic blanket and held together with rhythmic duck tape. Likened to PJ Harvey, Siouxsie Sioux and Skin, her songs are tales for the restless soul. She is currently working on her first EP, to be released through Monkey Love Records.

Girl in a Thunderbolt on MySpace

Debut - Click to download flyer