Entries by anne

Art Encounters of The Margaret Atwood Kind

I posted this last week on The Huffington Post under a different title: Art, Social Collapse and Apocalypse: Spaceship Unbound Imagine discovering, in a post-apocalyptic world, a trove of ancient newsreels and an old projector. You’re desperate to retrieve memories of your lost civilisation so… you rig up a bicycle-powered generator and start the film […]

Hay Festival #6: NoViolet Bulawayo and Meike Ziervogel

The last of my blatherings on Hay Festival 2013; I’ve saved the heart-breakers until last. NoViolet Bulawayo and Meike Ziervogel both delve into national traumas in their recent novels and both do so through a child’s point of view. On the final day at Hay I attended their emotionally charged event, which was introduced by […]

Hay Festival #5: 6 Commonwealth Writers on Writing

‘Kamila Shamsie has placed Pakistani literature on the world stage,’ said Razia Iqbal introducing a Commonwealth Writers’ panel on the second weekend of Hay Festival. Kamila Shamsie’s most recent novel Burnt Shadows takes the reader across the globe from Nagasaki in 1945, through Partition in India and on to 9/11 in New York, and Afghanistan. […]

Hay Festival #4: 7 Fiction Writers on Writing

Elif Shafak would like to see more Turkish books translated into Kurdish. ‘I was mesmerized when I came to Hay that the road signs are in English and Welsh. Maybe one day in Turkey we will have Turkish and Kurdish road signs.’ Her country operated, she said, on the basis that ‘everyone is Turkish. We […]

Hay Festival #3: Rhianna Pratchett on Writing for Games

I’m back from Hay Festival, the campervan is unpacked and I’ll be posting my favourite snippets from the 10-day literary event over the next few days. First up, Rhianna Pratchett in conversation with Guy Cocker. ‘Fifteen years ago when I was a games journalist, no one talked about narrative,’ said Rhianna Pratchett to a multi-generational […]

Hay Festival #1: Lydia Davis Booker International Winner

‘I do love the basic Anglo Saxon vocabulary,’ said US-writer Lydia Davis at Hay Festival. The remark was prompted by a question from the audience (Why do you write so many single-syllable words?) Davis continued: ‘I do like the Latinate, too, but Anglo Saxon is the language of great emotion. “I am so mad.” “You […]

Hay Festival Reading: Will Self and ‘Umbrella’

At Hay Festival in 2006 I intercepted Will Self between events and he very kindly signed my hardback copy of The Book of Dave. Only… he wrote “From Anne” instead of “For Anne.” No matter how hard I try to untangle this briefest of encounters (what exactly did I say? what did he say?), I […]