27 January 2012
Posted in Books and Poetry

Off the Shelf at Black’s is a literature collaboration between Black’s members’ club and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain books committee that organises a series of monthly, one-day residencies for fiction writers, held on the last Monday of the month.

The next writer-in-residence on Monday 30 January is Carol Topolski (pictured left, and author of Monster Love and  Do No Harm) and will be followed by:

• Lucinda Hawksley (Lizzie Siddal, 50 British Artists You Should Know), 27 February
• Owen Sheers (Resistance – from novel to movie), 19 March
• Alan Franks (Going Over, The Sins Of The Sons), 30 April

The writer will read from published work as well as works in progress. The audience will then discuss the work and writing processes, chaired by Jan Woolf of the WGGB books committee. After lunch, there will be an open mic session during which participants can read short extracts from their own work. This is an opportunity for established authors to receive mature critical feedback and for the audience to get some guidance.

The event will run from 11am-4pm. The cost is £25. This includes coffee, two-course lunch, and all-day and evening membership of Black’s. You will also get an automatic reference for club membership.

To book a place at the latest event, email daisy@blacksclub.com. For more information, email Jan Wolf (janwoolf@hotmail.com) but hurry – there are only 23 places for the event.

25 January 2012
Posted in Books and Poetry

Kirsten Ellis explains how her book Star of the Morning, The Extraordinary Life Of Lady Hester Stanhope came to be adapted by Oscar-winner David Seidler

Writers often feel that their books are their mythical, and in some cases actual, children; creations that spring from and are woven into their DNA. Whatever you might, in hindsight, wish to have written differently, there is no way to relinquish your progeny’s claim on you. For better or worse, your book, like your child, is part of you, and always will be. 

So when your book is optioned for adaptation to the screen, it creates an immediate form of separation anxiety. Suddenly your child is no longer yours, but a creature that belongs to other people too. You hope they will do well out there in the world, but you can’t control the outcome. You have to trust and let go, always remembering that, unlike a child, your book will always remain the way it was when it finally saw life; movies or television may well transmute your story into something you barely recognise, but your book will always be your book.

It was always hard not to imagine that the subject of my book, Lady Hester Stanhope, was obvious material for a film. Her life was packed with more drama, adventure, romance and exoticism than that experienced by most mortals. Noted equally for being headstrong, witty and beautiful, Hester went from living at 10 Downing Street with her uncle, the unmarried Prime Minister William Pitt (for whom she acted as both unofficial hostess and confidante), to a life in Syria so remarkable that it might have been invented by Rider Haggard. Her charisma and horsemanship so impressed the Bedouin that they made her an honorary emir, naming her for the Arab goddess, ul-Huzza, ‘Star of the Morning.’ A hundred years before T.E. Lawrence, she hoped to help unite the Arabs against the Ottomans, backed by the British, but her dream – and her hope to be a power-broker in the Middle East – put her too far ahead of her time.

Hester was an almost exact contemporary of Jane Austen – born three months apart - and the two could not be more opposite creatures of the same age.

Bedlam Productions optioned the film rights to my book part-way through filming their feature The King’s Speech, and well in advance of that film’s spectacular critical and commercial success. Indeed, I first met producer Gareth Unwin between takes on set in Portland Place on the day Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush filmed their famous f-word scene. I came away with a strong feeling that something truly magic was happening and with (The King’s Speech screenwriter) David Seidler writing the screenplay, I trusted that my book, which would now become The Lady Who Went Too Far, was most definitely in the best hands possible. The Bedlam team continue to impress me at every step with their commitment to remain true to the spirit of the book, and most importantly, to Hester herself.

04 January 2012
Posted in Books and Poetry

Stephen Leo Davis on self-publishing for Amazon Kindle

In 30-odd years of writing screenplays no-one has ever said to me: ‘This is a great moment to be trying to make a movie!’

But writers are up against it as never before. Television drama commissioning is in recession and the role of writers who do get commissioned is being brutally challenged by the ruthless industrialising of development and production that in turn lies behind a widely-perceived decline in quality and ambition of output.

The British movie industry – is like the Morgan Motor Company in relation to car manufacturing; utterly magnificent, but not war as we know it.

Meanwhile, the Grim Reaper has been working his way through mid-list fiction writers and non-celebrity authors for years. I can find cries of pain in newspapers right through the decade.

The decline of independent booksellers, the supermarket approach to book retailing, the destruction of the Net Book Agreement (Terry Maher, then boss of Dillons, was very cheery about his achievement when I met him recently at a social event in the sunny Cotswold uplands) have all combined to erode publishers’ confidence in the sort of risk-taking that would seem to all reasonable people to be the precursor to invention and creativity in literature, as in drama.

But grinning at us from a corner are the blood-drenched jaws of the selfsame animal that, we hear, has virtually finished off the music recording business: the internet.

30 December 2011
Posted in Books and Poetry

 Jan Woolf of the Guild’s Books Committee reflects on the Guild’s events in partnership with Black’s in London, and looks forward to the 2012 programme

You come in, sit down and have a coffee – a good coffee mind ; unless you prefer tea. If we’re beyond October the fires are lit. Then we settle in the same comfort enjoyed by children listening to a story. We hear from the writer: first reading from something published, then work in progress. And we discuss what we’ve heard. 

And boy what we’ve heard so far. Lindsay Clarke, an entirely fitting writer to launch Off the Shelf, gave a profound exposition of where writing comes from, why we do it and why we’re all nourished by literature. He read from his Whitbread Award winning The Chymical Wedding and his most recent work The Water Theatre. Jemima Hunt read from her emotional thriller The Late Arrival and, as an agent for the Writers Practice talked about the processes of getting published. We had Jake Wallis Simons and his enriching novel the English German Girl. Its subject, the Kindertransport of WW2, meant, of course, that discussion turned to the difficulties and emotional challenges of this subject matter. Check out the podcasts made from each talk.

After lunch is brilliant too. More readings in the restaurant, but this time from the audience, with the writer of the day helping others realise their own works. Its lovely, all of it, and we have the help and support of Fiction Uncovered to make it happen. So check out the spring programme (below).

18 October 2011
Posted in Books and Poetry

David Morgan (below, with fellow competitor Roberta Estrela D'Alva) explains how he came to be representing the UK at the slam poetry Coupe du Monde in Paris 

Slam poetry and the performance poetry scene that it swims in is an extremely vibrant and popular branch of the poetry scene, arguably the most popular. When you consider its connections with hip hop and rap, it is definitely the branch of poetry that most connects with youth.

Some slam poetry can present as little more than comic verse or 'stand up poetry', but that is far from the whole story. As a popular art form that mixes speechifying with poetry, sentimentality and political sloganeering can also be weaknesses, but again, that is not the whole story. Within these weaknesses – and there are always weaknesses in any popular art form – are very many serious artists, quite a few of whom are starting to make their living as poets, teachers of poetry and hosts of poetry events.

All this has been going on for a while, but the scene in London has grown dramatically while I've been up in Newcastle - and the scene in Europe has exploded over the last ten years or so. Enter the Coupe du Monde...

The World Cup of Slam Poetry has been going for several years, getting stronger each year. It take place in Paris, organised by volunteers from the very active and widespread French slam scene. It has no funding from central government, but it does attract funding from a number of city governments. This is partly because it happens as a part of the French National Team Slam Competition, which includes 60 slammers from all over France (competing in teams of four, representing the best of various slam venues), and the Paris-wide School Slam, which has slam teams from both high schools and junior high schools from all over Paris competing.

We participants in the Coupe du Monde attended the final of the junior high slam as guests and it was amazing. The auditorium was full of kids who, between poems, waved their signs and pompoms and nearly shouted the house down; it could have been an American football game. Special mention should be made of the team from Mauritius. Yes, odd that they would be competing in a Paris slam, but they were. I talked to the guy who brought the team up and he told me that all 31 grade schools in Mauritius have slam teams and they all competed for the chance to represent Mauritius in the Paris slam, which they won, by the way.

The Coupe du Monde itself was 16 slam champions from countries around the world: Brazil, Gabon, Mauritius, Russia, Canada BC, Quebec, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Scotland, England, and of course, France. The US slam champion cancelled at the last minute and was represented by another poet. The Coupe du Monde flew us in, put us up in hostels or supporters' flats, fed us and in the course of the contest gave us one of the most inspirational poetry experiences of our lives. We performed the poems in our native languages and the poems, which had been translated ahead of time, where projected onto screens behind us as we spoke. The whole event got the kind of coverage in the French newspapers that an English poet could only dream of.

12 October 2011
Posted in Books and Poetry

The winners of the 2011 European Union Prize for Literature have been announced

The winners of the 2011 European Union Prize for Literature (contemporary fiction), which recognises the best new or emerging authors in the EU, were announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Robert Adams, Chair of the Writers' Guild Books Co-op was one of the judges.

The winners:

Bulgaria

Kalin Terziyski -Is there anybody to love you (short stories)

Czech Republic

Tomáš ZmeškalT-Milostný - dopis klínovým písmem/ A Love Letter in Cuneiform Script 

Greece

Kostas Hatziantoniou - Agrigento

Iceland

Ófeigur Sigurðsson - Jon

Latvia

Inga Zolude- Mierinājums Ādama kokam/A Solace for Adam’s Tree (a collection of stories) 

Liechtenstein 

Iren Nigg - Man wortet sich die Orte selbst/ Wording the Places Oneself 

Malta

Immanuel Mifsud - Fl-Isem tal-Missier (tal-iben)/In the Name of the Father (and of the Son)) 

Montenegro 

Andrej Nikolaidis - Sin/The Son

The Netherlands 

Rodaan Al Galidi - De autist en de postduif/ The Autist and the Carrier-Pigeon 

Serbia

Jelena Lengold - Vašarski Mađioničar/ Fairground Magician 

Turkey

Ciler Ilhan - Sürgün/ Exile

United Kingdom

Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze

12 September 2011
Posted in Books and Poetry

Society of Authors launches Twitter campaign to promote short stories

On 14 September the Society of Authors will launch a short story tweetathon on #WriterWednesday. In a collaboration between top authors and tweeters, one story a week will be written via Twitter. Five, first-line contributions of varying genres will be tweeted from authors Simon Brett (The Feathering Mysteries), Neil Gaiman (American Gods), Joanne Harris (Chocolat), Ian Rankin (the Rebus novels) and Sarah Waters (The Night Watch).

Tweeters following the Society of Authors will be invited to complete the next four sentences. Every hour the best lines will be selected and the resulting short story will be published on the Society of Authors'  website. 

This campaign was created by the Society of Authors in response to the BBC short story cuts. 

You can read full details on the Society of Authors website.

19 August 2011
Posted in Books and Poetry

Off The Shelf at Black's is a new literature collaboration between Black's members club and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Books Committee. It’s a series of monthly, one day residencies for fiction writers that are held on the last Monday of the month.

This autumn they are:

• 26th September - Lindsay Clarke (The Water Theatre and Whitbread winner for The Chymical Wedding) www.fictionuncovered.co.uk
• 31st October - Jemima Hunt (The Late Arrival and director of The Writers Practice)
• 28th November - Jake Wallis Simons (The English German Girl) www.fictionuncovered.co.uk
• 19th December - Richard Bradbury (Riversmeet - a biography of Frederick Douglass, escaped slave and anti slavery campaigner). Supported by actor Nick Bailey who played Douglass in Become a Man, the play commissioned by the GLA for the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery. www.muswell-press.co.uk 

The day starts at 11:00am with coffee and ends at 4:00pm after lunch and an open mic session. All writers will read from previously published work as well as work in progress. An audience of up to 23 will then discuss the work and writing processes, chaired by Jan Woolf of the WGGB Books Committee. After that - lunch - then an open mic session during which participants can read short extracts from their own work if they wish.

This is an opportunity for established authors to receive mature critical feedback and for the audience to get some guidance too. Cost for each day is £25 (£20 to Writers' Guild members). This includes coffee, bread and olives, two - course lunch, and all day and evening membership of Blacks. You will also get automatic reference if you want club membership.

To book a place, email moira@blacksclub.com (stating that you are a WGGB member) or for more information janwoolf@hotmail.com

But hurry, there are only 23 places and it is an incredible bargain.

08 August 2011
Posted in Books and Poetry

The novelist and scriptwriter Stan Barstow died last week at the age of 83.

His best-known book, A Kind Of Loving, was also adapted into both a film and a TV series. The work was part of a trilogy that included The Watchers on the Shore and The Right True End.

In 1974 Barstow, who was a long-standing Writers' Guild member, won two Guild Awards: Best British Dramatisation (for South Riding) and Best British Radio Drama Script (for We Could Always Fit A Sidecar).

There are obituaries in the Telegraph and the Guardian and a tribute by Philip Hensher in the Independent.

Hensher writes: 'With the death of Stan Barstow, a distinctive and important part of English fiction comes to an end. Barstow was a working-class writer who emerged from what has been called an "unlettered" background thanks to grammar schools, a temporary vogue for his subjects, and a loose circle of similar, gifted writers.'

08 May 2011
Posted in Books and Poetry

Edited extracts from Rosemary Friedman’s new memoir, Life Is A Joke

Being asked the question ‘are you still writing?’ reminds one that in the mind of the questioner, at least, the writing is on the wall. ‘Would that God the gift had gi’ us to see ourselves as others see us.’ But he/she hasn’t. The psyche does not age. Inside we feel no different from how we felt at five, at 15, at 25 and so on down the decades and although we may scarcely recognise the image of ourselves reflected in the mirror, we regard with some surprise the fact that the questioner has had the temerity to ask at all.

Yes, I am ‘still’ writing. Even if we accept that our bodies can’t last for ever, nobody wants to spend their latter years as a shrunken grasshopper. We seriously want to keep our minds intact. The question, however, with its element of surprise at confronting the lines on your face and your silver hair, contains within it the thinly disguised amazement at the fact that not only are you ‘still’ writing but that you are ‘still’ alive. It is no consolation to know that the death rate for the human race is never less than 100 per cent.

‘Are you still writing?’ is usually followed by ‘Are you still living at . . . ?’ with its sinister implication of retirement home or sheltered housing. It was a neighbour who persuaded us, long before we needed it, that we would not always be able to cope with the physical demands of a house on five floors. Ten years ago, and in what we mistakenly thought was still our prime, we laughed him out of court. Not long afterwards, in response to estate agents’ particulars that mysteriously began to come through the door, we began to look at flats. Not seriously, mind: after a series of family houses with gardens, who could contemplate living on one comparatively minuscule and boring level with no outside space? Other people’s homes, like other people’s lives, reflected their lifestyles and had no bearing on our own. Paying lip service to their box-like rooms and their alien modi vivendi – we were not flat dwellers after all – we wondered where we would stash our boxes of papers, our thousands of books, our computers and printers in what passed for living space but was not how we lived. There is more than one death: one’s childhood, one’s youth, one’s middle, and often most productive, years.

10 April 2011
Posted in Books and Poetry

Norman Samuda Smith explains how he came to set up the Panther Newsletter

I was born and raised in Birmingham, England to Jamaican parents who came to the UK in the early 1950s. My formative years were spent in the Small Heath area of the city, living and growing up above my mother’s hair boutique.  

I started writing at the age of 10. At school I entertained my friends with fictional stories about a Birmingham-based black football team, the Caribbean Stars who played in the old First Division. I produced a comic based on these stories, which was circulated amongst my friends.

I completed my novel Bad Friday at the age of 17. It was published in 1982 by Trinity Arts Birmingham; was short-listed for the Young Observer Fiction Prize that year, and republished in 1985 by New Beacon Books. During the 1980s, I was a founder member of Ebony Arts Theatre Group. I acted with them and was commissioned to write their plays. We toured nationally for five years and performed in front of packed audiences. 

For a number of years I was encouraged by my writer friends to set up a website. When I thought about it I asked myself if I wanted to set up a website that was all about me and my publications; what workshops I’ve done or about to do - writing a daily journal while I wait for my next gig? The answer was no. I wanted my website to be different, a little something about me, but interactive, informative, organic and, most of all, engaging.

The original idea of Panther Newsletter was to provide a platform for local writers in and around the West Midlands area to be featured and talk about and promote their work, websites, etc. through an interview with me, and to encourage other budding writers and artists.  

When I initially sent out invitations to some local artists inviting them to be featured in the Newsletter, the initial response was slow. Of course, with anything new, it was understandable. My children then introduced me to Facebook. Once my profile had been set up, I soon made friends around the globe. 

23 March 2011
Posted in Books and Poetry

US judge says company has gone 'too far' 

Google's plans to create a huge online library of scanned books have been dealt a blow by an American court ruling rejecting a legal settlement with authors and publishers that Google reached in 2008.

The judge's ruling spoke of the possible benefits of the library project but he expressed concerns that it had gone 'too far' and would give Google too much competitive advantage from using copyrighted work without explicit permission.

One possible remedy, the judge suggested, would be for authors' participation to be on the basis on opting-in to the project rather than, as proposed under the deal agreed between the US Authors' Guild and Google, them having to choose to opt-out.

Responding to news of the ruling, Writers' Guild of Great Britain General Secretary Bernie Corbett said:

'I doubt this is the end of the story, but it was predictable that a case affecting millions of authors all over the world would get bogged down in the US courts, even though the original litigants were all prepared to settle.