THE BOOKBLAST® 10×10 TOUR
A CELEBRATION OF INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING
11 SEPTEMBER – 15 NOVEMBER 2018
A Nationwide Festival of Independent Publishing!
A carnival of authors, poets, translators and publishers, under the banner of trailblazing agency BOOKBLAST® created by Georgia de Chamberet, will be travelling to major cities across England, showcasing some of the finest independent-spirited literature and poetry being published today.
THE BOOKBLAST® 10×10 TOUR, in association with Waterstones, will visit nine regions of England, celebrating risk-taking publishers who fill a unique niche in discovering talent. The tour connects London and the regions.
This tour is about extraordinary writing. Writing that surprises, amazes and intrigues. Writing that challenges, disrupts and demands. Writing that is from the margins of culture portraying areas of life that the traditionalist mainstream often ignores. The tour will inspire readers, existing and new, to explore what’s happening in different parts of the world now, and to immerse themselves in the unfamiliar. Audiences will encounter writers from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. With these events, BookBlast® aims to unite people in the spirit of friendship and exchange.
THE BOOKBLAST® 10×10 TOUR launches in Waterstones Gower Street, located in the heart of Bloomsbury, London, followed by a series of themed talks, each one chaired by a small independent publisher, held in flagship regional branches of Waterstones over 9 weeks. It promises to be a hugely exhilarating celebration of the most electrifying prose and poetry being created today.
The 10 cities are:
LONDON | NEWCASTLE | LEEDS | NOTTINGHAM | BRIGHTON | NORWICH | BRISTOL | BIRMINGHAM | LIVERPOOL | MANCHESTER
The 10 publishers are:
DEDALUS LTD (English & European fiction) | BLUEMOOSE BOOKS (new fiction, new voices) | COMMA PRESS (groundbreaking short stories) | ISTROS BOOKS (books from the Balkans) | PEIRENE PRESS LTD (World literature in translation) | GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS (contemporary modernist) | HOPEROAD (African & Caribbean writing) | BALESTIER PRESS (contemporary Asian) | CARCANET PRESS (poetry) | SAQI BOOKS (writing from the Middle East)
The supporting partners are:
The Writers’ Centre (Norwich) | New Writing North (Newcastle) | The Society of Authors (London) | The Birmingham Literature Festival (Birmingham) | The Publishers’ Association (London) | Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature (Nottingham) | The Children’s Bookshow (London)
10X10 TOUR LISTINGS
LONDON
Tuesday 11 SEPT – Waterstones 82 Gower Street, London W1:
Theme: Independence: A Permanent Revolution.
Eric Lane DEDALUS, chair.
WITH author, Andrew Crumey (The Great Chain of Unbeing) & translator, Margaret Jull Costa (10 books by Eça de Queiroz).
NEWCASTLE
Wednesday 12 SEPT – Waterstones Newcastle:
Theme: The Northern Influence on Books & Culture.
Kevin Duffy BLUEMOOSE BOOKS, chair.
WITH authors, Dan Micklethwaite (The Less than Perfect Legend of Donna Creosote) & Colette Snowden (The Secret to not Drowning).
LEEDS
Thurs 20 SEPT – Waterstones Leeds:
Theme: Birmingham & Leeds: A Tale of Two Cities.
Sarah Cleave COMMA PRESS chair.
WITH authors, C.D. Rose (The Book of Birmingham) & Ian Duhig (The Book of Leeds).
NOTTINGHAM
Thurs 27 SEPT – Waterstones Nottingham: Theme: The End of the World? How the Balkans writes the Holocaust.
Susan Curtis ISTROS BOOKS chair.
WITH translator, Christina Pribićević-Zorić (The House of Remembering and Forgetting by Filip David, Serbia); (Doppelgänger by Daša Drndiç, Croatia) & translations editor, Georgia de Chamberet.
BRIGHTON
Thurs 4 OCT – Waterstones Brighton: Theme: Inside Out: Voices of the Diaspora in Contemporary Europe.
Meike Ziervogel PEIRENE PRESS chair.
WITH translators, Jamie Bulloch (The Last Summer by Ricarda Huch) & Nashwa Gowanlock (Shatila Stories).
NORWICH
Thurs 11 OCT – Waterstones Norwich, Castle Street: Theme: All Hail the New Modernists! Experimentalism & Contemporary Literature.
Sam Jordison GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS chair. WITH authors, Alex Pheby (Lucia), Paul Standbridge (Forbidden Line), Paul Ewen (Francis Plug: Writer In Residence).
BRISTOL
Thurs 18 OCT – Waterstones Bristol: Theme: Trading Places: Bright City, Dark Secrets.
Rosemarie Hudson HOPEROAD chair.
WITH authors, Peter Kalu (Silent Striker) and Qaisra Shahraz (The Concubine & The Slave Catcher).
BIRMINGHAM
Thurs 25 OCT – Waterstones Birmingham: Theme: The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write.
Elizabeth Briggs SAQI BOOKS chair.
WITH authors, Nafeesa Hamid, Aliyah Holder (The Things I Would Tell You edited by Sabrina Mahfouz).
LIVERPOOL
Thurs 1 NOV – Waterstones Liverpool: Theme: #MeToo Moments: taking an unvarnished look at men behaving badly in China.
Roh-Suan Tung BALESTIER chair.
WITH author Yan Ge (The Chilli Bean Paste Clan) & her translator Nicky Harman.
MANCHESTER
Thurs 8 NOV – Waterstones Manchester, Deansgate: Theme: Claiming the Great Tradition: Women Recalibrate the Classics.|
Michael Schmidt CARCANET chair.
WITH poets, Jane Draycott (trs. Pearl) & Jenny Lewis (Gilgamesh Retold).
Get your TICKETS here, this page links through to all the shop events:
THE BOOKBLAST® 10×10 TOUR, in association with Waterstones.
NOTES TO EDITORS
THE BOOKBLAST® 10×10 TOUR has grown out of the successful celebration of independent publishing kicked off in 2016 by Georgia de Chamberet via online journal The BookBlast® Diary which covers independent trade publishing and writing from France. Her idea was to showcase daring, risk-taking publishers who fill a unique niche discovering talent, publishing authentic and offbeat books which add value to the cultural landscape.
BookBlast® (est. 1997) is a London-based agency for editors and translators which grew out of BookBlast® originally being an authors’ agency. BookBlast® has always had a cosmopolitan ethos and gravitates towards the best independent-spirited and diverse writing from around the world. As well as their core editorial and translation services, they also manage several literary estates.
Georgia de Chamberet (BookBlast® Founder Director) is an editor and translator with thirty years of experience in independent publishing. She is the literary executor of the historian and traveller, Lesley Blanch (1904-2007), whose memoirs she edited. On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life was published posthumously by Virago in 2015; and a collection of journalism and biographical essays, Far To Go and Many To Love: People and Places, was published by Quartet in 2017.
A co-translation done with Natasha Lehrer, A Call For Revolution by the Dalai Lama and Sofia Stril-Rever, was published by Rider in May 2018. Georgia is currently translating The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez for Verso Books. She is on the Judging Panel – with Pete Ayrton, Fadia Faqir, Sophia Vasalou – for the 2018 Banipal Trust / Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation prize administered by the Translators’ Association. She will be at Ilkley Festival on 30 September and at the Isle of Wight festival on 13 October discussing Lesley Blanch & Bohemian Women.
10×10 TOUR SPONSORS
Waterstones is the UK and Ireland’s leading high street bookseller with 283 shops, and it employs over 3,000 booksellers. Waterstones is the only national specialist book retailer of scale in the UK, with the average sized shop carrying a range of around 30,000 individual books and with over 200,000 titles in the largest shop.
The Miles Morland Foundation offers African Writing Scholarships for African writers. Calling all African writers! For details about how to enter please visit the foundation’s website at milesmorlandfoundation.com
For more information about the 10×10 tour, or about BOOKBLAST® / @bookblast contact: SUE AMARADIVAKARA, PR COLLECTIVE / 07786 626492 / sue@prcollective.co.uk / @SueA1001
BookBlast® 10×10 Tour format © BookBlast® Ltd
We thank our sponsors and partners for their confidence in our work. Our vision here at BookBlast® would not have become reality without the commitment and active contribution from our sponsors and partners. Due to their support we are now able to get The BookBlast® 10×10 tour out on the road, showcasing the best of the best both offline and online, reaching all corners of the world.
