11 October 2011
Posted in Podcasts

Jan Woolf introduces novelist Lindsay Clarke (below) at the first of the Writers' Guild's Off The Shelf At Black's events

Also available as a podcast on iTunes, or via the Writers' Guild app for iPhone and iPad or Android. Read about future Off The Shelf At Black's events Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!

Edited transcript

Jan Woolf: Can I welcome you to the beginning of this project at Black’s which has been brokered between the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and Black’s Club with support from Fiction Uncovered.

I want now to introduce you to Lindsay Clarke – and I think it’s entirely right that a writer of Lindsay Clarke’s standing and accomplishment should start the Off The Shelf project.

Off The Shelf is about the material book in an age where it’s all coming through Kindle and so on. Lindsay’s thoughts and teachings on the place of literature and story in our lives is important and fascinating and I was fortunate enough to have been taught by Lindsay at Lum Bank about six years ago where he not only read from his work and provided excellent critique on our own, but also spoke about the place of story in our lives.

Lindsay’s books include Sunday Whiteman, The Chymical Wedding for which he won the Whitbread Prize, The War At Troy and, his latest, The Water Theatre – a very fine novel that I can highly recommend.

He has vast experience of education in the UK and Africa and he’s also working in Northern Ireland with the Pushkin Trust which is “about the transformative power of the imagination”, and I think that’s really what Lindsay’s about as a writer and as an educator through literature.

Lindsay Clarke: When when I was about six years old my mother bought a copy of Grimms’ Fairy Tales which had these extraordinary coloured illustrations. Reading this book was a magical experience for me, because I grew up in Halifax which at the time was a very dirty, industrial town covered in sulphurous smoke. Opening this book was like opening a door and stepping through into another world which was completely different from the world around me, and yet seemed to correspond to something that was already present inside me. And it was from that point on that I knew I wanted to be a storyteller, a writer.