Small Wonder: THE short story festival. 23-26 September 2010
Saturday 25 September
State of the Art?
With Kate Clanchy, Michèle Roberts and Di Speirs
Start: 12pm • Tickets: £9 (£8 Students)
Kate Clanchy, Michèle Roberts and Di Speirs bring us news
from the front line of contemporary fiction – short and long. Kate
Clanchy won the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award. She is also
a prize-winning poet and writer of the non-fiction, Antigona and Me. Novelist Michèle Roberts judged this year’s Orange Prize. Her
virtuoso collection of short stories, Mud, has just been published. Di Speirs, Executive Producer, BBC Radio 4, judged this year’s
Orange Prize for Debut Authors and is one of the founders of the
BBC National Short Story Award. Do they think that fiction is
thriving, or are we in thrall to ‘reality’?
Aspects of Love
With Patrick Gale and Salley Vickers
Start: 2pm • £9 (£8 Students)
Patrick Gale’s intriguing collection of short stories, Gentleman’s
Relish, mixes the mundane and paranormal, dissecting love and
loathing within families. He grew up in prisons - where his father
was a Governor - and now lives in Cornwall. His previous books
include Notes from an Exhibition and The Whole Day Through.
Salley Vickers’ hot-off-the-press collection of stories, Aphrodite’s
Hat, deals with the ramifications of different shades of love -
between lovers, friends, adults and children. Her subtle insights
reflect the fact that she is a qualified psychoanalyst. Her novels
include Miss Garnet’s Angel and the recent Dancing Backwards.
Ghost Light
With Joseph O’Connor
Start: 4pm • Tickets: £9 (£8 students)
Joseph O’Connor has published one volume of short stories, The Believers, and is renowned for his award-winning novels including the international best-seller Star of the Sea; Redemption Falls (‘... a dazzling narrative’. Colm Toibin) and the recent Ghost Light (‘A rare and wonderful book’. Michael Cunningham) which dramatises an episode in the life of the Irish playwright, J.M. Synge. Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin, where he still lives. He will talk about his influences, his passion for short stories which led to poaching one, his literary career and will read from his work.
Supported by the Dept. for English & Creative Writing, University of Chichester
D.H. Lawrence: Short Story Writer
With David Constantine
Start: 6pm • Tickets: £9 (£8 Students)
D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sons and Lovers, Women in
Love) was arguably at his very best as a writer of short stories, in
which his intensity and passion were most powerfully focussed.
David Constantine is a poet and writer of short fiction for whom,
since the age of fifteen, Lawrence has always been a major
touchstone. His latest short story collection, The Shieling, is hortlisted
for the important Frank O’Connor Award. Is D.H. Lawrence a
helpful model for contemporary short story writers or does his
peculiarly tormented psyche make him inimitable?
Life on the Margins
With Iain Sinclair
Start: 8pm • Tickets: £9 (£8 Students)
J.G. Ballard, one of England’s most original writers (Empire of the
Sun, Crash etc), who died last year, published very many short stories.
His portrayals of dystopian modernity, bleak manmade landscapes
and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments are sufficiently distinctive to have given rise to the
adjective, Ballardian.
Iain Sinclair, who knew Ballard well, is a poet, writer and filmmaker who has pioneered a new way of exploring the dark nooks and crannies of London and its social and literary history. His most recent book is Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire.