Tag: #bookchat

Interview | Ian Duhig, author & poet

Meet Ian Duhig in person at the 10×10 Tour event, Waterstones, Leeds 6.30 p.m. Thurs 20 SEPT. Theme: Birmingham & Leeds: A Tale of Two Cities. With Ra Page COMMA PRESS chair, authors  C.D. Rose (The Book of Birmingham) and Ian Duhig (The Book of Leeds). Book Tickets

Where were you born, and where did you grow up? 
London, the eighth of my parents but the first not born in Ireland, so I grew up in the London-Irish community of Paddington.

What sorts of books were in your family home?
Not many books but my mother knew a lot of poetry by heart as that’s how they learned it in Ireland in her youth; this with all her songs were very important to me.

Who were early formative influences as a writer?
I liked poetry at school but when I worked in Belfast in a hostel for young offenders before the Good Friday Agreement, discovering the Northern Irish poets like Heaney, Longley, Mahon, Muldoon, McGuckiand and more recently Sinead Morrissey was electrifying. Continue reading Interview | Ian Duhig, author & poet

BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Thurs 20 Sept., Waterstones, Leeds, 6.30 p.m. | C. D. Rose, Ian Duhig @commapress

The third talk of the BookBlast® 10×10 tour, a nationwide celebration of independent publishing, features Ra Page, founder and CEO of Comma Press, based in Manchester. Their “Reading the City” series of collected writings takes the literary adventurer down diverse explorations off the beaten track at home (such as The Book of Liverpool, The Book of Leeds) and abroad (such as The Book of Gaza, The Book of Havana, The Book of Riga, The Book of Tblisi). Continue reading BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Thurs 20 Sept., Waterstones, Leeds, 6.30 p.m. | C. D. Rose, Ian Duhig @commapress

Interview | Dan Micklethwaite, author

Meet Dan Micklethwaite in person at the BookBlast® 10×10 Tour discussion at Waterstones, Newcastle, 6.30 p.m. Wednesday 12 SEPT. Theme: The Northern Influence on Culture. With Kevin Duffy BLUEMOOSE BOOKS chair, authors Dan Micklethwaite (The Less than Perfect Legend of Donna Creosote) and Colette Snowden (The Secret to not Drowning). Book Tickets

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born and brought up in Brighouse, West Yorkshire.  Continue reading Interview | Dan Micklethwaite, author

BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Weds 12 Sept., Waterstones, Newcastle, 6.30 p.m. | Dan Micklethwaite, Colette Snowden @Ofmooseandmen

The second talk of the BookBlast® 10×10 tour, a nationwide celebration of independent kevin duffy bluemoose books bookblast interviewpublishing, features Kevin Duffy, founder of Bluemoose Books, based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. Prizewinning writers include Benjamin Myers, Michael Stewart and Adrian Barnes. He will be in conversation with Dan Micklethwaite and Colette Snowden, and the talk has as its theme The Northern Influence on Culture @waterstonesNewc

Dan Micklethwaite is an award-winning short story author and novelist who does most of his writing in a shed in West Yorkshire. His debut novel was shortlisted for The Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” in 2016. Continue reading BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Weds 12 Sept., Waterstones, Newcastle, 6.30 p.m. | Dan Micklethwaite, Colette Snowden @Ofmooseandmen

BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Interview with Robert Elms, BBC Radio London | 1 September, 2018

I was delighted to be invited on to the Robert Elms show on Saturday to talk about The BookBlast® 10×10 Tour in association with Waterstones.  

Interview with Robert Elms, BBC Radio London 

A carnival of authors, poets, translators and #indiepubs will visit 9 major cities across England, 11 September-15 November, inspiring readers to immerse themselves in authentic and offbeat writing which adds value to the cultural landscape. The independent sector is the home of experimental writing, poetic innovation and world writing in translation. With these events BookBlast® aims to unite people in the spirit of friendship and exchange.

The BookBlast® 10×10 Tour catalogue can be viewed or downloaded HERE

Buy Tickets HERE

Check out our kickstarter campaign your support will make a huge difference for all the artists, publishers and arts organisations involved.

Pledge HERE

BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Tues 11 Sept., Waterstones, Gower Street, W1 | Andrew Crumey, Margaret Jull Costa @dedalusbooks

The opening talk at 6.30 p.m. of the BookBlast® 10×10 tour, a nationwide celebration of bookblast eric lane dedalus booksindependent publishing, features Eric Lane, founder of Dedalus Books, in conversation with Andrew Crumey and Margaret Jull Costa, and has as its theme Independence: A Permanent Revolution @gowerst_books

Glasgow-born award-winning novelist, Andrew Crumey, lives in Newcastle and has had eight novels published by Dedalus. He has a PhD in theoretical physics and was literary editor of Scotland on Sunday for six years.  Continue reading BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Tues 11 Sept., Waterstones, Gower Street, W1 | Andrew Crumey, Margaret Jull Costa @dedalusbooks

Review | Robinson and An Overcoat, both by Jack Robinson a.k.a. Charles Boyle

Written in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum when the UK voted to leave the EU, Robinson is essential and entertaining reading. By the end of the 19th century there were over 700 spin-off versions of Robinson Crusoe: the novel is brilliantly and succinctly revisited by Charles Boyle a.k.a. Jack Robinson in a modern-day setting. 

Random thoughts from an offshore island

“James Joyce considered Robinson’s grandfather to be ‘the true prototype of the English colonist . . . The whole Anglo Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.’ Crusoe – the eponymous hero of the book by Daniel Defoe that is often considered to be the first English novel.” Continue reading Review | Robinson and An Overcoat, both by Jack Robinson a.k.a. Charles Boyle

Interview | Charles Boyle, author-publisher @CBeditions

Charles Boyle is the quintessential self-published author who also publishes books by other authors (similar to Virginia and Leonard Woolf who set up the Hogarth Press in 1917 and published works by key modernist writers as well important works in translation). CB Editions publishes books that are enticing, witty, essential reading. His blog is at Sonofabook.

Here is a selection of CB Editions’ top reads: Jennie Walker (one of Boyle’s pen names), 24 for 3 which was picked up by Bloomsbury; Jack Robinson (one of Boyle’s pen names), Days and Nights in W12, Robinson, By the same author, An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B.; Gabriel Josipovici, Only Joking; Andrzej Bursa, Killing Auntie & other work; Gert Hofmann, Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl; David Markson, This is Not a Novel ; Lara Pawson, This is the Place To Be; Diane Williams, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine; Will Eaves, The Inevitable Gift Shop.

Charles Boyle has given us an exclusive interview, so here he is in his own words: Continue reading Interview | Charles Boyle, author-publisher @CBeditions

Interview | Boyd Tonkin | Author of the Week

Where were you born, and where did you grow up? 
In suburban North London near the end of the Northern Line, in a small maternity home at the top of Hampstead Heath which later became a NHS nurses’ residence.

What sorts of books were in your family home? What did you read as a child?
Plenty, and an eclectic mix, but not entire walls or rooms of them. Always a fresh haul from the local library. My mother’s shelves had one of the very first Penguins: André Maurois’ Ariel (about Shelley). My father’s included rows of Pevsner’s Buildings of England, which always accompanied us on country walks and holidays. He knew German, went to German conversation classes until the end of life, so there was also some German literature in the original.
I vacuumed up the contents of the library (my first was Friern Barnet, not long ago saved from closure by a community campaign). I was a scattergun bookworm although I did early on develop a taste for classic science fiction (Verne to Bradbury). Also piles of books about cricket (again, always from the library). Somehow I fell in love with a collection picked up for a few pence from a jumble sale: Best Modern American Humour, in effect an anthology of the great New Yorker wits: Parker, Thurber, Benchley etc. I loved them then. Still love them now. Continue reading Interview | Boyd Tonkin | Author of the Week

Review | The 100 Best Novels in Translation, Boyd Tonkin | Book of the Week

“Since the ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism, the champions of translation – such as Goethe and Madame de Staël – have urged its necessity, if only as an inferior substitute for the true polyglot’s command of several tongues. That case still needs to be made, especially in English, whose position as a planet-spanning lingua franca may trick native speakers into the delusion that their language, or any language, may encompass the whole world of thought and art.” – from the Introduction 

Great novels help us to understand what makes people tick and offer glimpses into the human psyche; they are as illuminating as psychology books. Translated fiction gives a whole added dimension, opening windows on to other worlds and ways of being and perceiving, which is ever more important now that Britain is being forced to re-evaluate its place in the world.   

In 2001 when he was literary editor of The Independent, Boyd Tonkin revived the Independent Foreign Fiction Award – first won in 1990 by Orhan Pamuk for The White Castle (trs. Victoria Holbrook). He was one of the five co-judges until 2015 when it merged with the Man Booker International Prize. The prize has not only been a huge boost for quality translations and translators, but has also paved the way for other prizes – the TA’s translation prizes which recognize outstanding translations from works in Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish; the TA’s first translation prize; and the Warwick prize for women in translation.  Continue reading Review | The 100 Best Novels in Translation, Boyd Tonkin | Book of the Week