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Archive of Fiction Festival, 13 - 15 March, 2009 The 21st Fiction Festival was at its usual venue, the Town Hall on the Saturday Market Place. |
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On this page is the programme for the weekend and, beneath that, the biographies of each visiting writer, with links to their own websites for more information. |
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Each session lasts around 90 minutes, in two halves. During the interval, you can enjoy some refreshments while you browse the bookstall of works by the Festival's writers - all of whom are happy to chat and sign their books. |
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| Thanks to Chris West for allowing us to use this review of the weekend, taken from his website and blog at www.christopherwest.info
Monday, March 16th, 2009 I’ve just returned from the marvellous Kings Lynn Fiction Festival - always a breath of fresh air, both literally (take a walk along the riverfront between sessions) and metaphorically. My own role in the festival this year was to interview Tony Grey, the former Reuters correspondent held prisoner by Mao for over two years in response to the arrest of Chinese agents in Hong Kong. He spent that time in solitary confinement in a tiny room in his former house, with ‘Red Guards’ watching over him 24/7. He didn’t dwell on the horrors of this time, but gave enough insight to keep us all riveted (there’s a quality of attention you get from audiences when someone is saying something special, and it was present as Tony spoke). It was a wonderful interview to do. The rest of the festival was of equally high quality. All the readers were on top form, and a debate about the purpose of art was full of lively ideas, shared in a civilized manner (a delightful absence of the egotism and ideological point-scoring that can disfigure literary panels). The current literary scene seems very healthy to me: an old snobbery that raised a certain kind of writing (poetic, introverted, rather gloomy) above all else has been vanishing, and the modern reader is invited to choose from ‘highbrow’ to genre fiction, in the knowledge that many books in the latter (’genre’) category will be written by writers of great passion, intelligence and skill — and that if a book in the former (’literary’) category starts to bore them, they don’t need to feel intimidated. Story has reappeared as something that matters, and humour is valued again. The festival reflected this new energy and diversity: I’m looking forward to next year’s.
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The weekend at a glance |
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The Detective Novel and |
The Historical Novel D J Taylor and |
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Discussion Chaired by D J Taylor |
Desert Island Novels In which each of the writers will choose six novels and one gramophone record to take to a desert island
The Draw for our unique raffle prize, a book handwritten |
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The Regional Novel Rachel Hore, Mark Illis and |
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Booker Prize Winner Hostage In Peking In conversation with travel writer and novelist |
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(Click here for a printable version of this "Weekend at a glance" timetable.)
Introducing the writers of the 2009 Fiction Festival:
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Jill Paton Walsh |
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Sheet” (1974 Whitbread Prize for Children’s novels), “Unleaving” (1976 Boston Globe-Horn Book award), “A Parcel of Patterns” (1984 Universe Prize), "Gutter Samson’s Luck" (1984 Smarties Grand Prix). More recently she has written for adults. “Knowledge of Angels” (1994 Shortlisted for the Booker Prize). Jill Paton Walsh is also the author of four detective stories featuring Cambridge College Nurse, Imogen Quy. She has completed two Lord Peter Wimsey novels left unfinished by Dorothy L Sayers: “Thrones, Dominations” and “A Presumption of Death”. In 1996, she received the CBE for services to literature. |
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Sophie Hannah |
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Her book of short stories, “The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets” (2008), includes a story which won the Daphne du Maurier Short Story Competition. Sophie Hannah also writes children’s books. She is a Fellow Commoner at Trinity College Cambridge and a Fellow of Wolfson College Oxford. |
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Rachel Hore |
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Rachel Hore is a freelance editor and regular reviewer of fiction for The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday and The Literary Review. She teaches publishing at the University of East Anglia. |
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Mark Illis |
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Mark Illis has authored not only three novels - “A Chinese Summer” (1988), “The Alchemist” (1990), “The Feather Report” (1992) - but also a collection of short stories, “Tender” (due Spring 2009). He has written three radio plays, and for television, including EastEnders, The Bill and Emmerdale. He has reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement and The Spectator. He lives in West Yorkshire with his wife and two children. |
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Tessa West |
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Flute” (2004), “The Companion of Owls” (2008). Tessa West has also written four works of non-fiction, poetry and plays. She trained as a teacher and has worked extensively with young offenders and criminals, and as an Assistant Prison Governor. Two recent initiatives include being writer-in-residence for the Port Authority and
the Time and Tide Museum at Great Yarmouth, and searching through mud for a
project entitled Dredging the Wensum. Her main focus is now a fourth novel, based in a prison, whose working title is "Simon
Says". |
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Penelope Lively |
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shortlisted for the Booker prize, “The Road to Litchfield” (1977) and “According to Mark” (1984), and one, “Moon Tiger” (1987) was the Booker prize winner. The more recent of her 18 adult novels include “Making It Up” (2005) and "Consequences” (2007). “Oleander Jacaranda” is a compelling memoir of her Egyptian childhood. She has also written for radio and television and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded CBE in 2001. |
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Anthony Grey |
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horrors and humiliations at the hands of the Red Guards. His plight being headline news worldwide. He founded Hostage Action worldwide in the late 1980s at the time of the imprisonment of John McCarthy, Brian Keenan, Terry Waite and others. Anthony Grey is the author of a dozen novels, largely set in the Far East, including “Peking and Saigon” which achieved worldwide sales particularly in Australia and America. He was a regular BBC World News presenter in the 1970s and a producer of television documentaries on BBC and ATV. |
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Christopher Bigsby |
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Christopher Bigsby's biography of one of the twentieth century's greatest playwrights, “Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography” (2008), was based on boxes of papers Miller made available to him before his death in 2005. Christopher Bigsby was the presenter of “Kaleidoscope” on BBC Radio 4 for eight years in the 1980s, |
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Dame Beryl Bainbridge |
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two travel books and five plays. "The Dressmaker" (1973 Booker shortlisted, Guardian Fiction Prize), "The Bottle Factory Outing" (1974 Booker shortlisted, New Fiction Society Choice), "Injury Time" (1977 Whitbread Prize), "An Awfully Big Adventure" (1989 Booker shortlist), "The Birthday Boys" (1992 Whitbread shortlist), "Every Man for Himself" (1996 Booker shortlist, winner of Whitbread Fiction Prize), "Master Georgie" (1998 Booker shortlist, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Commonwealth Writers Prize, W H Smith Award). Her latest book was "According to Queeney" (2001). A selection of her years of journalism with the Evening Standard "Something Happened Yesterday" (1993). In 2003 she was joint recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement. |
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D J Taylor |
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He is the author of seven novels including “English Settlement” (1996 winner of Grinzane Cavour prize), |
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