Posted By: Katy Carr, 21 June 2010
There's still time to book the last tickets for Coetzee's event tomorrow - but please hurry; at the time of writing there's only six left!
Coetzee will follow hot on the heels of our Summer Reads event this evening, featuring Naomi Alderman, Nii Parkes and Mick Jackson, who’s driving in from Brighton as we speak. You can catch Nii and Mick on Radio Norfolk later on this week; we’ll be doing a pre-recorded interview later on today.
Simmone Howell, the delightful Australian novelist will be delivering her teen book group session later on today, a book which was apparently a gift to write as the female larger than life narrator sprang into life in six months. ‘They’re not usually that easy to write,’ she told me earlier. If you read the book however, you’ll feel that joyful ease – the book is fully formed and charged with the narrator’s easy wit.
As I write we’re also hosting the first of the Worlds Literature Festival workshops, we’ll keep you posted as to how they’re going, and Adrian Slatcher is preparing his report from the first writers’ round table, coming up soon.
The first public event last night took the form of three readings up at the UEA Drama Studio. Poet Kate Kilalea (below left) opened the evening, striding into the spotlight to read from her Carcanet collection One Eye'd Leigh. Kate described how important it can be to prepare the listener, leading them into the frame of mind in the way an architect would with a winding driveway; putting the listener in an appropriate frame of mind. This she did and frequently, so her alternative love poems full of dirty little creatures really hit the spot, as did her new six part piece, which she read without once looking down and which left the listener wanting more.
Henrietta Rose-Innes (above middle) continued the theme, reading from her novel and a short story (featuring her own burrowing creatures!), whilst Neel Mukherjee (above right) closed the evening with a scene from his novel, A Life Apart featuring his character Ritwik undergoing a frustrating evening with his 80 something charge who drunkenly asks him to read to her and then releases tantalising tit-bits from her life, before going under again, leaving him eager to hear more.
Which is a bit like how I feel now – eager for more of this week’s opportunities – and to discover more about the tantalising glimpses we’ve had into our writers’ intellectual and fictional worlds.
View images from last night's event on our Flickr page
