A WRITERS’ CENTRE NORWICH EVENT
WORLDS LITERATURE FESTIVAL 2014 MONDAY 16 – FRIDAY 20 JUNE
CONTENTS
WELCOME TO WORLDS 2014
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NORWICH UNESCO CITY OF LITERATURE
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USEFUL INFORMATION
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ENJOYING NORWICH
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2014 THEME: NOSTALGIA
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SCHEDULE
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MAP
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WORLDS PARTICIPANTS
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MEET WRITERS’ CENTRE NORWICH
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WORLDS LITERATURE FESTIVAL
WELCOME TO WORLDS 2014
WORLDS 2014: AN INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Norwich, England’s UNESCO City of Literature. We are very much looking forward to hosting you in our city. Worlds is the UK’s premier international literary Salon, hosted by Writers’ Centre Norwich (WCN) in June each year. In a unique residential week, writers from the UK and around the world gather for an extended conversation over four days about writing as an art, craft and profession. Alongside this, a public events programme enables audiences in Norwich to engage with outstanding writers from around the world.
The National Centre for Writing’s vision is a joined-up and well resourced support network for reading, writing and literary translation in the UK; its purpose is to promote a culture where the literary arts can thrive. Our Communications team will be at large throughout Worlds, hoping to talk to our guests about these plans and perhaps to interview some of you.
We are very grateful for any assistance you can offer during this exciting time for the Writers’ Centre. At the heart of what we do at Worlds is the private Salon, a space created and fed by the writers who take part and driven by a series of provocations, essays, conversations and questions from the writers present.
While the team at Writers’ Centre, Professor Jon Cook of the University of East Anglia, and the writers commissioned to present provocation papers have some sense of the shape of the discussion over the four days, we really have no idea where the conversation and the group might take us. We entrust that decision to you, the writers.
WCN is planning an ambitious period of growth and expansion over the next two years. We have recently been awarded planning permission to develop a Georgian town house on Norwich Marketplace, and intend to open this as a specialist venue for literature – the National Centre for Writing – in 2016. The facilities, to be shared between WCN, the British Centre for Literary Translation, elements of the University of East Anglia Creative Writing programme and other regional and national partners, will include a suite of flexible teaching and meeting rooms, a cafe, a basement bar, writer hot-desks, a developmental space for live literature productions and a state-of-the-art auditorium – all hooked up digitally with a worldwide community of literature houses, festivals, universities and publishers. It will be a space where the best in world literature is easily available to audiences and readers, where emerging talent is nurtured and celebrated, and which benefits its local communities through participatory programmes and innovative education projects.
WORLDS LITERATURE FESTIVAL
The theme for 2014 is “Nostalgia”. Opening with tributes to W.G. Sebald, the Salon will proceed to interrogate variations on and uses of this fascinating concept. Denise Riley and Owen Sheers will begin by deconstructing the nostalgic sensibility, while Wojciech Tochman and James Scudamore will look at different possibilities the act of looking back has for their respective genres (reportage and the novel). We’ll cover literary translation and the notion of a translator’s nostalgia for his or her source text in a panel debate, and Kerry Young and Akhil Sharma will offer differing perspectives from the postcolonial frontline. Finally Xiaolu Guo and Bernice Chauly take the debate into multi-disciplinary territory through incorporating photographs and film in their presentations. Ruth Ozeki noted last year that Worlds was “the most wonderful and transformative conference[...]. It has to do with faith and a feeling of citizenship in an international literary community, something that I did not have before.” Another participant has summarised the format as being “a tour de force of thoughtful and sophisticated literary connoisseurship that actually works. Egos are suspended, differences set aside, energies and attention funnelled into rollicking roundtable dialogues that sound like every word matters, and matters intimately.” I hope that the conversations this year turn out to be as productive and enjoyable for you. CHRIS GRIBBLE CHIEF EXECUTIVE, WRITERS’ CENTRE NORWICH
Landmarks of Norwich by Martin Figura
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NORWICH UNESCO CITY OF LITERATURE 2 A CITY OF FIRSTS IN 2012, NORWICH CONSOLIDATED ITS POSITION AS ENGLAND’S FOREMOST LITERARY CITY BY BECOMING ITS FIRST UNESCO CITY OF LITERATURE, JOINING AN ELITE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK COMPRISING EDINBURGH, MELBOURNE, IOWA CITY, DUBLIN, REYKJAVIK AND KRAKOW. Here are ten reasons to be proud of Norwich’s literary influence: 1 A CITY OF LITERATURE Norwich has been a literary city for 900 years: a place of ideas where the power of words has changed lives, promulgated parliamentary democracy, fomented revolution, fought for the abolition of slavery and transformed the literary arts. Today, it remains the regional centre for publishing and is home to five per cent of the UK’s independent publishing sector. People in Norwich spend more per capita on culture than anywhere else in the UK, and Norwich remains a destination for poets, novelists, biographers, playwrights, translators, editors, literary critics, social critics, historians, environmentalists and philosophers. It is a place for writers as agents of change.
The first book written by a woman in the English language came from the pen of Julian of Norwich in 1395, when a series of visions led her to compose Revelations of Divine Love – an extraordinary contemplation of universal love and hope in a time of plague, religious schism, uprisings and war. In the sixteenth century, the first poem in blank verse was written here by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. The first English provincial library (1608) and newspaper (1701) followed, and Norwich was also the first place to implement the Public Library Act of 1850. More recently, in 1970, Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson founded the UK’s first Creative Writing MA at University of East Anglia (UEA); Ian McEwan was the first graduate. In 2006, Norwich became the first (and still is the only) UK city to join the International Cities of Refuge Network, which was formed to promote free speech and support imperilled writers. 3 A CITY OF LIBRARIES The Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library, housed in the magnificent Forum in the heart of Norwich, has been the most-visited public library in the UK for the past seven years and lends more items than any other in the country. Across the city, the Cathedral library is home to more than 20,000 books (some dating back to the fifteenth century), while the John Innes Centre hosts a remarkable collection of natural-history and rare books.
4 A CITY OF INDEPENDENT BOOKSHOPS AND PUBLISHERS The Jarrold family arrived in the East of England in the seventeenth century, bringing with them the art of printing and bookbinding. They published Anna Sewell’s global bestseller Black Beauty in 1877, and today the Jarrolds department store contains one of the foremost independent bookshops in the UK. Norwich’s newest addition, The Book Hive, opened in 2009 to national praise and in 2011 was named by The Telegraph as the Best Small Independent Bookshop in Britain. 5 A CITY FOR WRITERS AND READERS Formed in 2004, and the force behind Norwich’s UNESCO bid, Writers’ Centre Norwich is a literature development agency that works locally, nationally and internationally. It provides professional development for writers through workshops, courses, networking and competitions, reaches thousands of children through innovative school programmes, connects with readers through a successful summer reading campaign, and hosts a series of highprofile events throughout the year. The Worlds international gathering of writers is held each June and offers a uniquely writer-focused forum for discussion and debate about writing and literature from a writer’s perspective. In March 2012, Writers’ Centre Norwich was awarded £3 million from Arts Council England’s Capital Investment Programme fund to develop the National Centre for Writing.
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8 A CITY OF REFUGE
Following a successful start with Ian McEwan, the Creative Writing MA at UEA has established itself as the foremost course of its kind in the UK and a global hub for national and international literature. Graduates include three Booker Prize winners (McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Anne Enright), as well as a number of other major prize-winners including Tracy Chevalier, Joe Dunthorne and Naomi Alderman. The British Centre for Literary Translation at UEA, founded by the renowned author W.G. Sebald, is Britain’s leading centre for the development, promotion and support of literary translation from and into many languages.
Writers’ Centre Norwich established Norwich as the UK’s first City of Refuge for threatened writers, and was a founding member of the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN). Norwich was also a founding member of the Shahrazad project, which brought together six Cities of Refuge to open up a free space for writers from all over the world to connect and tell their stories.
7 A CITY OF INDEPENDENT MINDS Writers from Norwich have, quite literally, changed the world. Born just south of Norwich, Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, a treatise that influenced the course of the American Revolution, and his Rights of Man is one of the most widely read books of all time. Harriet Martineau, another Radical and campaigning journalist, wrote promoting the causes of gender and racial equality, personal responsibility, fair economics and evidence-based science. Celebrated polymath Thomas Browne, prison reformer Elizabeth Fry and, more recently, humorist Stephen Fry, have all called Norwich their home.
9 A CITY OF PERFORMANCE Norwich is the focal point for a thriving live literature scene, and is home to some of the most vibrant and creative performance poets in the UK. Aisle 16 was formed by a group of students at UEA in 2000 and has delighted audiences ever since, playing a central role in the development and popularity of live literature at festivals over the past decade. Founding member Luke Wright also set up Nasty Little Press in 2009, dedicated to publishing poetry from the UK’s best loved live poets – including Molly Naylor, Martin Figura, Tim Clare, Hannah Walker and John Osborne, all Norwich residents. 10 A CITY OF FESTIVALS Norwich is home to the oldest city arts festival in the country, the internationally renowned Norfolk and Norwich Festival. At UEA, the biannual International Literary Festival regularly plays to packed houses of up to 500, and celebrated its twentysecond anniversary in 2012. Within an hour of Norwich are a multitude of other literature festivals, including the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Poetry-nextthe-Sea and Cambridge Wordfest.
The Hostry at Norwich Cathedral by Dave Guttridge
WORLDS LITERATURE FESTIVAL
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USEFUL INFORMATION WRITERS’ CENTRE NORWICH
ACCOMMODATION
CATERING
REIMBURSEMENT
THE WORLDS TEAM
MEDIA
Located on Princes Street (just across the road from your hotel and the Cathedral Hostry), festival organiser Writers’ Centre Norwich is the leading literature development agency in the East of England, and the driving force behind Norwich’s UNESCO World City of Literature activities. Our friendly staff are at your disposal throughout the Festival, so for enquiries large and small, for a quiet place to relax with a cup of tea, to record an interview or use the internet, and to find out more about the work we do – then please do feel free to drop in.
Your accommodation is in the picturesque Maids Head Hotel on the ancient street of Tombland, the heart of Norwich’s Cathedral Quarter and a few minutes’ walk away from the central shopping district, where you can access shops, banks, restaurants and bars.
All meals are provided during the week of Worlds (17 – 21 June). Details of lunches and dinners can be found in the schedule. A choice of Continental and Full English breakfast is included in your Maids Head room booking – simply make your way to the restaurant between 7am and 9.30am and wait to be seated by a member of the hotel staff.
You have been emailed an invoice form for expenses incurred travelling to and from the Worlds festival. Please fill in any outstanding claims (e.g. train fare, taxi cost) and present with your receipts or tickets to the WCN Finance Staff before departing Worlds festival. Annelli Clark, Finance Officer, will be available at the WCN offices at the following times: Monday 16 June, 12.30pm-5.30pm Tuesday 17 June, 9.15am-2.45pm Wednesday 18 June, 9.15am-2.45pm Thursday 19 June, 9.15am-2.45pm Friday 20 June, 9.15pm-5.30pm International: Amounts over £200 will be paid by electronic transfer so we will require your international bank details; for amounts below £200, please note that we are only able to provide reimbursement in pounds sterling.
Writers’ Centre Norwich office: (between 9am and 5pm) 01603 877177
Photography and Video Recording Photographs and short video recordings will be taken throughout the week and will be used for publicity purposes. If you would prefer not to have your photograph taken, please let WCN know.
Writers’ Centre Norwich 14 Princes Street, Norwich NR3 1AE 01603 877177
Writers’ Centre Norwich
WORLDS LITERATURE FESTIVAL
The Maids Head Hotel Tombland, Norwich, NR3 1LB 01603 272007 ACCESSING THE INTERNET Wi Fi internet access is complimentary throughout the Maids Head Hotel; you will be given a password on arrival at Reception. Computers with internet access will be present during the afternoon events, and you can also log in to Wi Fi at the WCN offices.
TRANSPORT WCN will organise free transport to and from the Festival events, and to all Festival venues that are further than a short walking distance from each other (including restaurants). If you have any questions or additional requests, please ask a member of the WCN team.
The Worlds Salon by Martin Figura
Jon Morley Programme Director: 07904 163025 Jenny Allison Programme Manager: 07800 794691 Lauren Farley Programme Assistant: 07540 292912
Twitter If you tweet we are using the hashtag #worlds14 for this event.
Ruth Ozeki by Martin Figura
The Worlds Salon by Martin Figura
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Audio Recording WCN may ask to audio record your events with us. Audio will be used for non-profit purposes only. Recordings will include the provocations given during Salon sessions but not the Salon discussion, which will not be recorded for public use. Images, video and audio may be shared following Worlds via www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk www.newwriting.net
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ENJOYING NORWICH THINGS TO SEE THE FOLLOWING IS A GUIDE TO SOME OF OUR FAVOURITE PLACES IN NORWICH. FOR MORE IDEAS AND LISTINGS, SEE: www.visitnorwich.co.uk www.visitnorfolk.co.uk FURTHER INFORMATION CAN BE FOUND AT THE NORWICH TOURIST INFORMATION CENTRE, THE FORUM, MILLENNIUM PLAIN, NORWICH, NORFOLK, 01603 213999.
Norwich Cathedral by Martin Figura
WORLDS LITERATURE FESTIVAL
1 Walk the Cathedral grounds and surrounding streets, and visit the Cathedral. The Cathedral and its grounds cover a large area in the centre of Norwich and all parts can be walked for free. Particularly look out for Pulls Ferry, the Old Hospital (a stunning building with an ancient chained library), The Adam and Eve pub (the oldest in Norwich, dating back to the 12th century) and, if you have time, stop in at the Cathedral as well.
3 Mousehold Heath offers the country-side on your doorstep; you can lose yourself in forest and rolling hills. There is also an 18-hole Pitch and Putt course hidden away.
2 Explore the shops in The Lanes and the Market. There has been a market on that site since Saxon times and it is now the largest Monday-to-Saturday open market in the country: over 190 stalls selling just about anything you could want. Nearby, Norwich Lanes (roughly the streets behind the Tesco Metro) boast a range of fabulous shops including independent clothing, jewellery and book retailers.
5 Take a trip out into Norfolk. Great Yarmouth has beaches, a pier, mini golf, Segway racing, greyhounds, fish and chips, hot fresh donuts and lots more besides. Buses and trains to Yarmouth are frequent and reasonably priced, and a journey should take no more than 45 minutes. The North Norfolk countryside and coastline offer pretty towns such as Cromer, Holt and Wells-next-the-Sea with picture postcard views, local cuisine, hiking, beaches and water sports.
4 The Plantation Gardens is a hidden gem. Located just behind the Catholic Cathedral, it is a beautiful planned Victorian gardens that feels a little bit like stepping into a forgotten city. Free to enter, though donations requested.
BARS
TRANSPORT
6 Get tea / coffee / hot chocolate and cake in the Britons Arms, a charming cafe on Elm Hill (one of the oldest roads in England). The Britons Arms was used in the film Stardust and, as well as delicious cakes, boasts a delightful secluded garden.
Frank’s Bar 19 Bedford Street, NR2 1AR A cafe bar in the centre of Norwich with table service. Good breakfasts, reasonable food served all day. Popular artsy venue where films are shown on Sunday afternoons.
Norwich Bus Station Surrey Street, Norwich Regular buses from Norwich to the rest of East Anglia and much of the UK.
7 Norwich Castle offers an intriguing mix of local history museum, art gallery (featuring lots of Norfolk School watercolours), with a bit of Victorian taxidermy and Ancient Egyptian history thrown in for good measure. Interesting to climb to the top and look out over Norwich, and descend into the dungeons below. Sometimes you can try on armoury.
The Playhouse Bar 42-58 St. Georges Street, NR3 1AB A cool and popular bar that is part of an independent theatre. Lovely beer garden overlooking the River Wensum, and a good range of drinks. Late night opening and DJs. A quieter room is also available.
8 Strangers Hall on Charing Cross is one of Norwich's oldest and most fascinating buildings, dating back to 1320. Stroll through a maze of interlinked rooms enriched with textiles and period objects, bringing the days of the Tudors and Stuarts vividly to life.
Image courtesy of The Book Hive
Jarrold Print Museum by Martin Figura
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Norwich Train Station Regular trains from Norwich to the rest of East Anglia and much of the UK. OTHER USEFUL NUMBERS Local taxi service 01603 619619 Emergency services (Police, Fire and Ambulance) 999
The Bicycle Shop 17 St. Benedicts Street, NR2 4PE A quirky independent cafe / bar that serves food and drinks in comfortable surroundings. Take Five 17 Tombland, NR3 1HF Just across the road from your hotel, this bustling tavern offers food, drinks and occasional live literature events from Monday to Saturday.
The Forum
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2014 THEME: NOSTALGIA
THE RETURN. HOME. THE PAIN OF ITS IMPOSSIBILITY. BORDERS, DISPLACEMENT AND EXILE. ANNIVERSARIES, CHILDHOOD AND GHOSTS. On the tenth occasion of Worlds, we’ve chosen to focus on the theme of ‘Nostalgia’, a word with powerful literary and emotional resonances. The first syllable of the word, nostos, was used in Homeric epics as both a theme and a structure. It connected the idea of telling a story to a notion of return to a homeland after a long period of absence. Its second syllable, also derived from Greek, speaks of pain, the kind of pain that comes from yearning and loss, perhaps for a place that cannot be recovered or that never existed. Some consider nostalgia to be a means of escape from complexity and responsibility and some a trope offering acute historical critique. It finds powerful expressions in literary work of both the Romantic and the Modern periods. But then so apparently does its
SCHEDULE
opposite, for ‘Home’ must often be left behind in the search for freedom and autonomy. Worlds 14 will be devoted to the themes, structures and emotions associated with this equivocal world. Is there a compulsion in story telling to return to a moment of real or imagined origin? Is nostalgia, as writers from Schiller to Benjamin have argued, a distinctly modern form of sensibility? Is it a feeling that literature both resists and exploits at one and the same time? And what, if any, relevance does it have in a world of migration, diaspora and nomadic wandering? From Odysseus’s journey to becoming (so Adorno said) the first modern subject, via Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” and the founding tropes of postcolonial literature, to the ‘retro-futurism’ of Steampunk and the contested emergence of the New Aesthetic, we’re looking back at our own origins to think about the future of Worlds in years to come.
PROFESSOR JON COOK UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA
An audience at Worlds by Martin Figura
MONDAY 16 JUNE
WEDNESDAY 18 JUNE
THURSDAY 19 JUNE
FRIDAY 20 JUNE
5.30pm Maids Head Hotel PROVOCATEURS MEETING WITH JON COOK
10.30am Norwich Cathedral Hostry LOST IN TRANSLATION With Julia Franck and Anthea Bell, Dai Congrong, Yang Lian, David Morley, Masatsugu Ono and David Boyd, Gioia Guerzoni, George Szirtes, and Daniel Hahn.
11.00am – 12.30pm Norwich Cathedral Hostry MORNING READS Featuring David Morley, Kendel Hippolyte, Oonya Kempadoo, Bernice Chauly and Sharlene Teo. Hosted by Jonathan Morley (Programme Director, WCN).
9.00am – 12.00pm FREE TIME
12.00pm – 1.00pm Norwich Cathedral Hostry LUNCH
12.30pm – 1.30pm Norwich Cathedral Hostry LUNCH
1.00pm – 4.00pm Norwich Cathedral Hostry SALON DAY TWO: ENDLESS RECALL. PROVOCATIONS: ‘The Ecstasy of Impossibility’ by James Scudamore and ‘The Words are Worn Out’ by Wojciech Tochman with Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
1.30pm – 4.30pm Norwich Cathedral Hostry SALON DAY THREE: EXILE AND RETURN. PROVOCATIONS: ‘Laminating Life’ by Akhil Sharma and ‘Re-inventing Home: selective memory of a half forgotten place’ by Kerry Young.
4.00pm – 4.30pm BREAK
4.30pm – 7.30pm FREE TIME
4.30pm – 6.00pm Norwich Cathedral Hostry AFTERNOON READS Featuring NoViolet Bulawayo, Adam Foulds, Hanne Ørstavik, Dan Burt and Denise Riley. Hosted by Andrew Cowan (Director of Creative Writing, UEA).
7.30pm – 9pm Norwich Playhouse AN EVENING WITH J.M. COETZEE, ´ XIAOLU GUO, IVAN VLADISLAVIC AND JULIA FRANCK Hosted by Chris Gribble (Chief Executive, WCN).
7.30pm The Assembly House, Theatre Street WELCOME DINNER WITH A CELEBRATION OF W.G. SEBALD Featuring Kathryn Heyman, George Szirtes and Bae Su-ah. TUESDAY 17 JUNE 10.30am Norwich Cathedral Hostry INTRODUCTIONS 12.00pm – 1.00pm Norwich Cathedral Hostry LUNCH 1.00pm – 4.00pm Norwich Cathedral Hostry SALON DAY ONE: THE ACHE FOR HOME. PROVOCATIONS: ‘Is Nostalgia A Bromide?’ by Denise Riley and ‘The Want Of War’ by Owen Sheers. 4.00pm – 4.30pm BREAK 4.30pm – 6.00pm Norwich Cathedral Hostry AFTERNOON READS Featuring C.J. Driver, Louise Doughty, Akhil Sharma, Kerry Young, S.B. Veda and Yang Lian. Hosted by Kate Griffin (International Programme Director, British Centre for Literary Translation). 7.30pm – 9.00pm Norwich Playhouse THE UNEXPECTED PROFESSOR: JOHN CAREY IN CONVERSATION WITH D.J. TAYLOR
6.30pm St Peter Hungate Church, Princes Street THE VOICE PROJECT PRESENT ‘SOUVENIR’
9.30pm Roots Restaurant, Pottergate DINNER
12.00pm – 1.00pm King’s Centre, King Street LUNCH 1.00pm – 4.00pm King’s Centre, King Street SALON DAY FOUR: LEAVING TEXT BEHIND. PROVOCATIONS: ‘Bloodlines’ by Bernice Chauly and ‘Nostalgia for “Auteurs”: Stop being a Word Smith, be a Vanguard Visionary!’ by Xiaolu Guo. Plus summing up. 4.30pm – 6.00pm King’s Centre, King Street AFTERNOON READS Featuring Helen Mort, Wojciech Tochman, James Scudamore, Owen Sheers, Masatsugu Ono and Kathryn Heyman. Hosted by Katy Carr (Communications Director, WCN). 6.00pm – 8.00pm FREE TIME 8pm The Last Wine Bar & Restaurant, St George Muspole Cut-Through FAREWELL DINNER
8.30pm The Wine Cellar, Guildhall Hill DINNER
9.30pm The Maids Head Hotel DINNER WORLDS LITERATURE FESTIVAL
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WORLDS PARTICIPANTS
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BAE SU-AH
ANTHEA BELL
CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY
Bae Su-ah was born in Seoul in 1965, graduated from Ewha Women’s University with a BA in Chemistry, and made her literary début in 1993 with the short story ‘The Dark Room of 1998’. She is one of the most highly acclaimed contemporary Korean authors, with over ten short story collections and five novels to her name. She received the Hanguk Ilbo literary prize in 2003, and the Tongseo literary prize in 2004. She lived in Germany for over a decade, and also translates literary works from German into Korean.
Anthea Bell is a freelance translator from German and French, educated at Oxford University and the mother of two adult sons. Her translations include works of fiction and general non-fiction, books for young people including the Asterix the Gaul series, and classics by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Freud, Kafka, and Stefan Zweig. She has won the UK Schlegel-Tieck award for translation from German (four times); the 2002 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (UK) and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize (USA), both for the translation of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (the former with the author); the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation; and the 2009 OxfordWeidenfeld Translation Prize. She was appointed OBE in 2010.
Christopher Bigsby is an academic, novelist, biographer and broadcaster. For 18 years he chaired the British Council’s Cambridge Seminar and for 21 years the Arthur Miller Centre International Literary Festival at UEA (four volumes of interviews based on this series have been published). At UEA he is in charge of international developments in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.
1 Assembly House Theatre Street, NR2 1RQ 2 The Bicycle Shop 17 St Benedicts Street, NR2 4PE 3 Frank’s Bar 19 Bedford Street, NR2 1AR 4 King’s Centre 47-51 King Street, NR1 1PH 5 The Last Wine Bar & Restaurant 76 St George’s Street, NR3 1AB
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06 Maids Head Hotel 20 Tombland, NR3 1LB 07 Norwich Cathedral Hostry 12 The Close, NR1 4DH 08 The Playhouse Bar 42-58 St Georges Street, NR3 1AB 09 Roots 6 Pottergate, NR2 1DS 10 St Peter Hungate Church Princes Street, NR3 1AE
This map is based upon or reproduced from Ordnance Survey material with the permission of Ordnance Survey on behalf of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office © Crown Copyright. Unauthorised reproduction infringes Crown copyright and may lead to prosecution or civil proceedings. Norwich City Council Licence No. LA 10009747
“We’d been perfectly happy to forget the city we’d left behind, our forgetting was by now almost complete, and even the threadbare skeins of faded memories, which we’d used to wear like uniforms of sorrow, had, in time, slipped furtively from our withered shoulders.” BAE SU-AH (translation Deborah Smith)
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WORLDS PARTICIPANTS NOVIOLET BULAWAYO
DAN BURT
CORTINA BUTLER
BERNICE CHAULY
J.M. COETZEE
David Boyd obtained his master’s degree at the University of Tokyo and is currently enrolled in the East Asian studies doctorate programme at Princeton University. He has translated stories by Riichi Yokomitsu, Hyakken Uchida and Masatsugu Ono, among others.
NoViolet Bulawayo is the author of We Need New Names (2013), which won the LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Pen/Hemingway Award, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award (second place). In addition, the novel was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and selected to the New York Times Notable Books of 2013 list, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers list, NPR’s Great Reads of 2013, and others. The National Book Foundation named NoViolet one of its “5 Under 35” writers for 2013. NoViolet grew up in Zimbabwe, studied for her MFA at Cornell University, and is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She lives in Oakland, California.
Dan Burt, born in South Philadelphia, read English at Cambridge, attended Yale Law School and was a lawyer and businessman, before beginning to publish poems and prose in Granta, PN Review, the TLS, the FT and New Statesman, among others. He lives and writes in London and St. John’s College, Cambridge, of which he is an Honorary Fellow.
Cortina Butler is Director of Literature at the British Council. She has more than 30 years’ experience working in the international publishing industry, most recently as Global Editor-in-Chief for the Reader’s Digest Association where she responsible for delivering the programme of fiction and nonfiction books and music, video and digital products for the Reader's Digest companies worldwide. Immediately before joining the British Council she was Managing Director of the book trade online news service www.bookbrunch.co.uk. She is also a Director of the visual arts copyright organisation DACS.
Bernice Chauly is a Malaysian writer and poet. She has written five books of poetry and prose including the award-winning memoir Growing Up With Ghosts (2011). For 20 years she worked as a multi-disciplinary artist and is recognized as one of the most significant voices of her generation. In 2005, she founded Readings, Malaysia’s longest-running live literary platform, now in its tenth year, and was also Festival Curator of the George Town Literary Festival from 2011-2013.
J.M. Coetzee’s work includes Waiting For the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Summertime, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.
Bert Nienhaus
DAVID BOYD
Sponsored by the Nippon Foundation
Supported by the British Council (Malaysia)
Sponsored by Etisalat
“Come December the year folds its wings like a great, tired bird, and they return home for Christmas.” NOVIOLET BULAWAYO
“The old scrapbook now tattered with age, gnarled pages, sticky tape and fingerprints that have traversed page by page, year after year, decade after decade.” BERNICE CHAULY
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WORLDS PARTICIPANTS ED COTTRELL
DAI CONGRONG
JILL DAWSON
ISOBEL DIXON
Catherine Cole is Professor of Creative Writing and Deputy Dean, Faculty of Creative Arts, Wollongong University, NSW, Australia. As well as her academic writing, she has published novels, short stories, poetry and memoir. She previously worked at RMIT University in Melbourne, University of Technology, Sydney and the University of UNSW. She is a former member of the Australian Research Council's Excellence in Research Australia trial committee in Humanities and the Creative Arts and has provided expert advice to a range of universities on their research and creative practice activities. She is a regular book reviewer, participant in Australian and international writers' festivals and a judge of major national book awards.
Jon Cook is Chair of Arts Council England, South East. He is Professor of Literature at the University of East Anglia and a former Dean of the School of Humanities. The focus of his teaching and research has been on romantic and modern literature. He has supervised a large number of PhD students on subjects in modern literature, literature and philosophy, and creative and critical writing and he was convenor of the MA in creative writing at UEA from 1986-1996. He has taught at universities in the United States, Europe and India, most recently as a Hurst Visiting Professor at the University of Washington. He is on the international advisory board of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College and a Literature advisor to the British Council. His recent publications include Poetry in Theory (2004) and a biographical study, Hazlitt in Love (2007). He played an active role in establishing Writers’ Centre Norwich and the Worlds programme, and has hosted and chaired the Salon since its inception in 2005.
Ed Cottrell works as a Literature Assistant at the British Council, focussing on the Cultural Programme at the London Book Fair. Prior to this he worked as Digital Media Officer at Writers’ Centre Norwich and as a Webmaster at HowTheLightGetsIn. He lives in London and collects words, music, pictures and videos at highprecisiongravitybeams.tumblr.com
Dai Congrong (Congrong) holds a Ph.D in Comparative Literature and World Literature, and is director at the Centre for Literary Translation at Fudan University. She is the author of three books: Joyce, Said and Other Diasporic Intellectuals; Book of Freedom: Reading Finnegans Wake; Form Experiments in James Joyce’s Texts; and of more than 60 papers both in Chinese and in English. She is also the translator of four books: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Frank Furedi’s Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, Jorge Larrain’s Ideology and Cultural Identity: Modernity and the Third World Presence, and David Chaney’s The Culture Turn. Her translation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (Book 1) was awarded the “Influential Book in 2012 in China” and the “Good Book in 2012”. She was elected “Golden Translator in 2012” by Qianjiang Evening News.
Jill Dawson is the best-selling author of eight novels, including Fred & Edie, Watch Me Disappear, The Great Lover and Lucky Bunny. She has been twice nominated for the Orange Prize. Caryl Phillips says of her recent novel, The Tell-Tale Heart: “Not since Graham Swift’s Waterland has anyone written as passionately about the Fen region of England. A beautifully crafted novel by an outstanding writer.” She currently teaches creative writing for the Faber Academy and the Guardian / UEA Masterclasses.
Supported by the University of Wollongong
WORLDS LITERATURE FESTIVAL
Jo Kearney
JON COOK
Tim Allen
CATHERINE COLE
Isobel Dixon is a literary agent and poet, living in Cambridge. Born in Umtata, South Africa, she has Masters degrees in English Literature, and in Applied Linguistics, from Edinburgh University. She is a director of the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency in London, and represents writers from around the world, including many acclaimed South African writers like Achmat Dangor, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Deon Meyer, Marlene van Niekerk, Ivan Vladislavic´, Imraan Coovadia and Zakes Mda. Internationally, her poetry has been published in The Paris Review, Southwest Review, Carapace, New Contrast and New Coin and in the UK in The Financial Times, Wasafiri, The Guardian, London Magazine, The Wolf, Succour, and The Warwick Review, among others.
Sponsored by BCLT
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WORLDS PARTICIPANTS LOUISE DOUGHTY
C.J. DRIVER
JULIA FRANCK
Adam Foulds is a poet and novelist from London. He has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer Of The Year, the Costa Poetry Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the South Bank Show Prize for Literature, the Encore Award, and the European Union Prize For Literature. His 2009 novel, The Quickening Maze, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010. His latest novel, In The Wolf’s Mouth, was published by Jonathan Cape in February 2014.
Julia Franck was born in Berlin in 1970. Her novel The Blind Side of the Heart won the German Book Prize and sold over a million copies in Germany alone. It was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and US magazine Kirkus Reviews. Back to Back was her second to be published in the UK, in 2013 and was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. West is to be her third book translated into English, due to be published in autumn 2014. She lives in Berlin.
C.J. Driver (Jonty Driver) is South African by birth, upbringing and most of his education. President of the National Union of South African Students in 1963 and 1964, he was detained in solitary confinement by the security police in 1964, then came to England, where he was stateless for five years before becoming a British citizen. He has published five novels, seven collections of poetry (the latest Citizen of Elsewhere), two biographies (the latest My Brother & I) and an essay in autobiography, Used to be Great Friends.
KATE GRIFFIN
GIOIA GUERZONI
Kate Griffin is International Programme Director at the British Centre for Literary Translation, at the University of East Anglia, and has developed projects in the Middle East, Asia and Europe. An international literature consultant, she also works with Writers’ Centre Norwich and the London Review of Books. From 2005 until 2010 Kate was a judge for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Gioia Guerzoni lives in Milan and has been happily translating fiction, mainly from English into Italian, for the past twenty years. She has worked on American and British authors – Ben Marcus, Teju Cole, Jonathan Lethem, Siri Hustvedt, Paula Fox, Colm Tóibín, Cynan Jones – as well as on several Indian writers. Every winter she travels around Asia for a few months, scouting for new writers, translating, organizing workshops on translation or publishing and, occasionally, writing articles for magazines. She works as a consultant for the Italian publishing house Il Saggiatore and as fiction scout (SEA & Pacific) for the Barcelona-based Pontas International Literary Agency, and with the Asia Literary Review.
Thorsten Greve
Ellen Elmendorp
Charlie Hopkinson
Louise Doughty is the author of seven novels, most recently Apple Tree Yard, published by Faber & Faber UK, a paperback bestseller in UK and Ireland and currently published or being translated into twenty languages. Apple Tree Yard was her first novel since Whatever You Love, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also won awards for radio drama and short stories, along with publishing one work of nonfiction, A Novel in a Year, based on her hugely popular newspaper column. She is a critic and cultural commentator for UK and international newspapers and broadcasts regularly for the BBC, teaching writing for the Guardian / UEA Masterclass programme and the Faber Academy.
ADAM FOULDS
“And here was a world intact, like a dream of his childhood.” ADAM FOULDS
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WORLDS PARTICIPANTS XIAOLU GUO
KATHRYN HEYMAN
KENDEL HIPPOLYTE
OONYA KEMPADOO
KYEONG-SOO KIM
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with some forty books to his name. His translations from Portuguese, Spanish and French include fiction from Europe, Africa and the Americas, and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé. He has won the Blue Peter Book Award (2004) and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2007). A former chair of the UK Translators Association, he is now national programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, and on the board of a number of organisations including Pop Up Projects, the Society of Authors and English PEN. He is currently compiling the new Oxford Companion to Children's Literature.
Kathryn Heyman is the author of five novels, including Floodline, published by Allen and Unwin in September 2013. She has won numerous awards including an Arts Council England Writers Award, the Wingate and the Southern Arts Awards, and been nominated for the Orange Prize, the Scottish Writer of the Year Award, the Edinburgh Fringe Critics’ Awards, the Kibble Prize, and the West Australian Premier’s Book Awards. Her radio plays for BBC Radio include adaptations of her own work. As well as directing the fiction program for Faber Academy Australia, Kathryn Heyman is the director of the Australian Writers Mentoring Program.
Born in St. Lucia in 1952, Kendel Hippolyte is a poet, playwright and director. Recently retired from academic work, his present focus is to use his skills as a writer and dramatist to raise public awareness and contribute to active solutions of critical social issues. He has published six books of poetry, and his work has appeared in various journals such as The Greenfield Review, The Massachusetts Review and in the anthologies Caribbean Poetry Now, Voiceprint, West Indian Poetry and many others. As a poet, his writing ranges across the continuum of language from Standard English to the varieties of Caribbean English, and he has also written poems in Kweyol, his nation language. He works in traditional forms like the sonnet and villanelle as well as in so-called free verse and in forms influenced by rap and reggae.
Oonya Kempadoo was born in England to Guyanese parents. She has lived in Europe and on various islands in the Caribbean. Her first novel, Buxton Spice, was published in 1998 to great acclaim. Her second novel, Tide Running, won the prestigious Casa de las Americas Literary Prize for best English or Creole novel. Her latest novel, All Decent Animals, published by Farrar Strauss & Giroux in 2013, was included on Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine summer reads list. She is currently completing a narrative of local perspectives of sexual abuse and developing a speculative fiction, multimedia, eco-social project. Oonya is a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence and Creative Writing instructor for academic year 2013-2014 with two community colleges in Connecticut, USA, and advisor to the Caribbean literacy non-profit organisation, Hands Across the Sea. She lives in St. George’s, Grenada.
Kyeong-Soo Kim is a freelance interpreter, who is currently pursuing her PhD at SOAS with a focus on Korean literature translation.
Philippe Ciompi
DANIEL HAHN
Xiaolu Guo was born in China and now lives in London. She is the author of Village of Stone (the translation was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award); A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and translated into twenty-four languages), 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth (which was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize), UFO in her Eyes, recently made into an awardwinning film by Xiaolu herself, and a collection of short stories, Lovers in the Age of Indifference. Xiaolu Guo is a successful filmmaker of feature films and documentaries; her work has premiered all over the world, most recently at the Venice Film Festival. In 2013 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.
Supported by Fringe St Lucia and Peepal Tree Press
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Sponsored by the British Council to facilitate Bae Su-ah’s participation in the Salon
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WORLDS PARTICIPANTS
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a full-time translator of Polish literature, and twice winner of the Found in Translation award. Her publications include fiction by Paweł Huelle, poetry by Tadeusz Dabrowski, reportage by Wojciech Jagielski, and children’s literature by Janusz Korczak. She is a mentor for the BCLT’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme.
Masatsugu Ono (b.1970) maintains a steady output of fiction while doubling as a professor and researcher of Francophone literature. After doing graduate work at the University of Tokyo, Ono earned his PhD at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes – Saint-Denis). In 2001 he made his fiction debut with the novel Mizu ni umoreru haka (The Water-Covered Grave), winner of the Asahi Award for New Writers. In Nigiyakana wan ni seowareta fune (Boat on a Choppy Bay), which won the Mishima Yukio Prize, Ono applied his study of creoles—the rich languages and cultures created from the blending of an indigenous culture with a foreign one. In addition to writing other works of fiction such as Mori no hazure de (At the Edge of the Forest) and Maikurobasu (Microbus), he has published translations of works by Édouard Glissant and Marie NDiaye.
JON McGREGOR
DAVID MORLEY
HELEN MORT
Jon McGregor writes novels and short stories, most recently the story collection, This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You, and the novel, Even The Dogs, for which he won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize. As a Professor of Creative Writing at The University of Nottingham, he edits ‘The Letters Page’, a literary journal in letters. He lives in Nottingham, and divides his time.
David Morley is a leading British poet, critic and ecologist. He has published 23 books, including 11 collections of poetry. His poetry and prose have been translated into several languages and his book The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing is a bestseller around the world. His new collection of poems from Carcanet is The Gypsy and the Poet, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His previous collection Enchantment was a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year. He is Professor of Writing and Head of the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University and adjunct Professor at Monash University, Melbourne.
Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985. Her collection Division Street was published by Chatto & Windus and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She has published two pamphlets with Tall-Lighthouse Press, ‘the shape of every box’ and ‘a pint for the ghost’, a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2010. Five-times winner of the Foyle Young Poets award, she received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she became the youngest ever poet in residence at The Wordsworth Trust.
Matthew Hedley Stoppard
c
HANNE ØRSTAVIK
Linda Bournane Engelberth
MASATSUGU ONO
Japanese Literature Publishing & Promotion Center
ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES
With the publication of her first novel in 1994, Hanne Ørstavik (born in 1969) embarked on a career that has made her one of the most admired authors in Norwegian contemporary literature. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of ‘Love’ (Kjærlighet), which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years. Since then she has written several acclaimed novels and has received a host of literary prizes, including the Dobloug prize for her entire literary output as well as the Brage prize, Norway’s most prestigious literary award. Ørstavik’s novels have been translated into 18 languages – and, with Peirene’s publication of The Blue Room this June, into English. Supported by NORLA
Sponsored by the Nippon Foundation
“My experience as a writer is that just because a language is declared poggadi (Romani for ‘broken’) or is not recognised by the Bodleian Library or by my own government it does not mean it cannot be melted, re-forged and hammered back into life.” DAVID MORLEY
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WORLDS PARTICIPANTS JOHN PREBBLE
DENISE RILEY
SINÉAD RUSSELL
JAMES SCUDAMORE
AKHIL SHARMA
Martin Pick is a former publisher and now a literary agent (Chair of Charles Pick Consultancy and of Tibor Jones). He set up the annual Charles Pick South Asia Writing Fellowship at UEA in 2001 to support unpublished writers of prose. He campaigns for human rights issues worldwide and especially for artists and writers, and is a writing mentor at the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture.
John Prebble is the Relationship Manager for Literature at Arts Council England in the South East. He works with a wide range of organisations and individuals – including Writers’ Centre Norwich and the British Centre for Literary Translation – to support their work and to develop literature in its various forms across the area. Prior to joining Arts Council, John worked in literature festivals and writer development at Canterbury Festival, Folkestone Literary Festival, Hay Festival and Latitude Festival. John’s current areas of focus at the Arts Council include grant support for writers, independent publishing and live literature.
Denise Riley’s books include War in the Nursery (1983); “Am I that Name?” Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (1988); The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000); The Force of Language, with Jean-Jacques Lecercle (2004); Impersonal Passion: Language As Affect (2005) and Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012). Her recent writing is concerned with the immediate emotionality of language, and the nature of self-description and irony. She’s published collections of poetry including Penguin Modern Poets 10, with Douglas Oliver and Ian Sinclair (1996) and Denise Riley: Selected Poems (2000). She teaches part-time at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.
Sinéad Russell is Senior Programme Manager (Literature) at the British Council where she works on the literature element of cultural relations projects in the Americas. She has worked with writers and artists around the world and has designed literature showcases, exchanges, writer-in-residence schemes and projects in creative writing, creative reading and literature education in more than 50 countries. She has been a Trustee for Apples & Snakes, the UK’s leading performance poetry organisation, and an Artistic Assessor for Arts Council England. Prior to this, she taught English in a secondary school in Japan, and worked in public libraries in London.
James Scudamore is the author of three novels. His first, The Amnesia Clinic, won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2007 and was shortlisted for four other prizes, including the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His second, Heliopolis, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. Wreaking is his most recent book. He has held two fellowships at the University of East Anglia and teaches at City University Hong Kong and on the Guardian / UEA Masterclass scheme.
Akhil Sharma was born in Delhi, India in 1971. He has lived in the United States since he was eight years old. He is an award winning short story writer and novelist, and has worked as an attorney, investment banker and screenwriter. Describing what he learned from spending almost thirteen years writing his autobiographical novel Family Life, a novel about an Indian immigrant family grappling with a catastrophic injury to one of its members, he says, “I have become intolerant of unhappiness. When I feel sadness creeping in, I think: Will you waste even more time being unhappy?”
Bill Miller
MARTIN PICK
Sponsored by the US Embassy
“Often when he walked down the street in Delhi, he would feel that the buildings he passed were indifferent to him, that he mattered so little to them that he might as well not have been born.” AKHIL SHARMA
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WORLDS PARTICIPANTS OWEN SHEERS
GEORGE SZIRTES
SHARLENE TEO
WOJCIECH TOCHMAN
S.B.VEDA
IVAN VLADISLAVIC´
Owen Sheers’ second poetry collection, Skirrid Hill won a Somerset Maugham Award. His verse drama Pink Mist won the Hay Medal for Poetry. His non-fiction includes The Dust Diaries (Welsh Book of the Year 2005) and Calon; A Journey to the Heart of Welsh Rugby. His novel Resistance was made into a film in 2011. His theatre work includes The Passion and The Two Worlds of Charlie F. (Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award). His WWI play Mametz will be produced by National Theatre of Wales in June 2014. His next novel I Saw A Man will be published in 2015.
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ágnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe’s Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books are The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; New & Collected Poems (2008); The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009) and Bad Machine (2013). Bloodaxe has also published John Sears’ critical study Reading George Szirtes (2008). Szirtes lives in Norfolk and recently retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia.
Sharlene Teo is the current David TK Wong creative writing fellow at the University of East Anglia. She was the 2012/13 recipient of the Booker Foundation scholarship and the youngest winner of the Singapore Press Holdings Golden Point Award for Poetry in 2005. Her writing has appeared in places such as Esquire, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Eunoia Review, and Broadcast: New Warwick Writing.
Wojciech Tochman, born in 1969 in Krakow / Poland, is a non-fiction writer, cooperating with the “Gazeta Wyborcza”, and is one of the most widely translated Polish reporters, published in English, French, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Russian, Dutch and Bosnian. With Like Eating a Stone (2002), about post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, Tochman was a finalist for the Nike Literary Prize and for the Prix Témoin du Monde, awarded by the Radio France International. Another book, Today We’re Going to Draw Death (2010) investigates the scars of the Rwandan genocide. Eli, Eli is the title of his newest book, telling the story of the Philippines, of the unknown world of the poorest of the poor who have lived for years in the slums and graveyards of Manila. He is the director the Polish Institute of Reportage. He lives in Warsaw.
Sujoy Bhattacharyya (pen-name S.B. Veda) is a former consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, who worked in the financial districts of both Canada and the USA before embarking on a distinguished career in the Canadian public sector. He was born in London, and grew up in Canada, to Bengali Indian parents. A senior contributor to the Montrealbased newspaper, Pragati, he is also the former editor of The Lance-Chronicle and co-founded The Global Calcuttan Magazine (www.globalcalcuttan.com), a web-based review on art, politics, culture, lifestyle, and global reportage. He is the Inaugural Associate Artist of the Tagore Centre in the United Kingdom and believes in culture beyond borders and the intemperate abandonment of the simple idea.
Ivan Vladislavic´ was born in Pretoria in 1957 and lives in Johannesburg. His publications include the novels The Folly, The Restless Supermarket, The Exploded View and Double Negative; two books of stories, republished in the compendium volume Flashback Hotel; and an account of life in Johannesburg, Portrait with Keys, which was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and won the Alan Paton Award. He sometimes writes in response or resistance to the work of visual artists. The Exploded View was provoked by the imagery of artist Joachim Schönfeldt, while Double Negative appeared initially in TJ / Double Negative, a joint project with photographer David Goldblatt. TJ / Double Negative won the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Award for best photography book. Supported by And Other Stories
Sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute
“I could have dwelled in that dumb bath of slumber until the world finally ended.” SHARLENE TEO
“A year after the mass murder, in accordance with the wishes of the survivors, they decided to open the grave and re-bury the dead under concrete slabs. That was when they discovered that those who lay just under the surface were still intact, like dried mushrooms.” WOJCIECH TOCHMAN (translation Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
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MEET WRITERS’ CENTRE NORWICH
YANG LIAN
KERRY YOUNG
Pablo Goikoetxea
Yang Lian was one of the original Misty Poets who reacted against the strictures of the Cultural Revolution in China. Born in Switzerland, the son of a diplomat, he grew up in Beijing and began writing when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. On his return he joined the influential literary magazine Jintian (Today). His work was criticised in China in 1983 and formally banned in 1989 when he organised memorial services for the dead of Tiananmen while in New Zealand. He was a Chinese poet in exile from 1989 to 1995, finally settling in London in 1997. Translations of his poetry include three collections with Bloodaxe, Where the Sea Stands Still (1999), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, Concentric Circles (2005), and Lee Valley Poems (2009), as well as his long poem Yi (Green Integer, USA, 2002) and Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections (Shearsman, 2008), a compilation of earlier work. He is co-editor with W.N. Herbert of Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), and was awarded the International Nonino Prize in 2012.
Kerry Young was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Chinese father and mother of mixed Chinese-African heritage. She came to England at the age of ten. Her first novel Pao, was published by Bloomsbury in 2011 and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the East Midlands Book Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize. Her second novel Gloria, was published in April 2013. It was shortlisted for the East Midlands Book Award and longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She has just completed her third novel for Bloomsbury, Fay, scheduled to be published in spring 2015.
“Zhang and my father was just boys when they busy fighting for Dr Sun Yat-sen and the Republic and when that was done he leave China and come to Jamaica and live like a hermit, until my father get killed and Zhang save up the passage and send for us.”
CHRIS GRIBBLE CHIEF EXECUTIVE
JENNY ALLISON PROGRAMME MANAGER
KATY CARR COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR
ANNELLI CLARKE FINANCE OFFICER
LAUREN FARLEY PROGRAMME ASSISTANT
MARTIN FIGURA FINANCE MANAGER
MELANIE KIDD PROGRAMME COORDINATOR
ALISON McFARLANE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
CONOR McGEOWN DEVELOPMENT MANAGER
KERRY YOUNG
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NOTES
JON MORLEY PROGRAMME DIRECTOR
SAM RUDDOCK PROGRAMME MANAGER
LAURA STIMSON PROGRAMME MANAGER
LEILA TELFORD RESOURCES MANAGER
RICHARD WHITE MARKETING OFFICER
ROWAN WHITESIDE MARKETING ASSISTANT
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NOTES
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