Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of The Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has written for both children and adults, and her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children’s Verse, the Whitbread and Forward Prizes, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. In 2005, she won the T. S. Eliot Prize for Rapture.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance
N.B. All dates / times are provisional and subject to final confirmation

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Currently reigning as Britain’s first female Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy is also queen of the dramatic monologue. Duffy’s poetry gives voice to society’s alienated and ignored in an unstuffy but compelling manner, wrestling with ideas about language and identity. As Duffy says herself: “I like to use simple words but in a complicated way.”

Her adult poetry collections are Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Other Country (1990); Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year); The World’s Wife (1999); Feminine Gospels (2002), a celebration of the female condition; and Rapture (2005), winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize. Her children’s poems are collected in New & Collected Poems for Children (2009).

She also writes picture books for children, and these include Underwater Farmyard (2002); Doris the Giant (2004); Moon Zoo (2005); The Tear Thief (2007); and The Princess’s Blankets (2009).

Carol Ann Duffy is also an acclaimed playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her plays include Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) and Loss (1986), a radio play.

She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1984 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1992 from the Society of Authors, the Dylan Thomas Award from the Poetry Society in 1989 and a Lannan Literary Award from the Lannan Foundation (USA) in 1995. She was awarded an OBE in 1995, a CBE in 2001 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

LINKS
Jeanette Winterson interviews Carol Ann Duffy
Sisters in Poetry | The Guardian | May 2009
Carol Ann Duffy: The Original Good Line Girl | The Times | May 2009
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New Selected Poems
Price: GBP 10.10

18 used & new available from GBP 5.02

Sir Christopher Meyer

Christopher Meyer served as Ambassador to the United Kingdom to the United States from 1997 until 2003. He was a vital link in the important relationship between America and Britain, one of the closest periods since the Second World War.

He had previously been British Ambassador to Germany and chief spokesman and press secretary for former Prime Minister John Major, and for Geoffrey Howe when he was Foreign Secretary.

In 2003 Meyer was appointed Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, a position he held until April 2009. He was knighted in 2001.

He published his memoirs, DC Confidential, in November 2005, with extracts serialised in The Guardian and the Daily Mail. The book gave rise to considerable controversy, with the British government declaring it an “unacceptable” breach of trust, while a group of MPs urged him to “publish and be damned”. Meyer gave a detailed rebuttal of his critics in written evidence submitted to the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration. In 2005, the memoirs were included in his books of the year by Jim Hoagland, the authoritative Washington Post commentator on foreign affairs.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance
N.B. All dates / times are provisional and subject to final confirmation

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Books:
DC Confidential, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (2005)
Getting Our Way: 500 Years of Adventure and Intrigue: the Inside Story of British Diplomacy, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (2009)

Simon Brett

Simon Brett worked as a producer in radio and television before taking up writing full time. He is the much-loved author of the Fethering series, the Mrs Pargeter novels and the Charles Paris detective series. Married with three grown-up children, he lives in an Agatha Christie-style village on the South Downs..

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance
N.B. All dates / times are provisional and subject to final confirmation

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LINKS

Simon Brett’s website – www.simonbrett.com

Simon Brett on BBC Radio Devon

Blood at the Bookies: The Fethering Mysteries
Price: GBP 4.78

49 used & new available from GBP 0.10

Susan Hill

Susan Hill is a prolific writer: the author of numerous novels, collections of short stories, non-fiction and children’s fiction as well as a respected reviewer, critic, broadcaster and editor.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance
N.B. All dates / times are provisional and subject to final confirmation

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Susan Hill’s novels and short stories have won the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham and John Llewelyn Rhys awards and been shortlisted for the Booker. Her books are set texts for GCSEs and A levels. She is the author of Mrs de Winter and acclaimed ghost stories – The Woman in Black, The Mist in the Mirror and The Man in the Picture – as well as a recent novel, The Beacon, and the series of crime novels featuring policeman Simon Serrailler. Susan Hill lives in Gloucestershire, where she runs her own small publishing firm, Long Barn Books.
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LINKS

Susan Hill’s website: www.susan-hill.com
The Woman in Black
Susan Hill’s Blog | Daily News Commentary for the Spectator

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The Shadows in the Street (Simon Serrailler 5)
Price: GBP 7.68

23 used & new available from GBP 7.54

Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is one of our most important living writers. She is the author of eleven books, including Wolf Hall, A Place of Greater Safety, Giving Up the Ghost, and Beyond Black, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance
N.B. All dates / times are provisional and subject to final confirmation

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Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall – Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2009 – is an historical novel about Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell and was published in May 2009. Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.

Hilary Mantel is now working on a sequel to Wolf Hall called The Mirror and the Light, which, she says, “traces Thomas Cromwell’s continued rise to power after 1535, and follows him to his own fall and execution in 1540. In this novel the first great crisis is the fall of Anne Boleyn.”

Hilary Mantel also writes reviews and essays, mainly for The Guardian, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

LINKS

Interview with Hilary Mantel | The Boston Globe | October 2009
The Man Booker Prize
Hilary Mantel: The Novelist’s Arithmetic
Sarah O’Reilly talks to Hilary Mantel
Women over 50 – the invisible generation | Hilary Mantel | The Guardian | August 2009

Wolf Hall
Price: GBP 9.49

48 used & new available from GBP 2.22

Caroline Taggart – How To Get Published

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“Writing the piece is only half the battle,” says Caroline Taggart, the editor of Writer’s Market UK 2010 (The Insider’s Guide To Getting Your Book Published) and whose own books include I Used To Know That Stuff You Forgot From School (2008) and A Classical Education (2009).

Caroline has been an editor of non-fiction books for nearly 30 years and has covered nearly every subject from natural history and business to gardening and astronomy.

Caroline will be running a workshop at the Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival 2010 on “How to get Published”. Aspiring writers taking their first steps towards publication will receive valuable advice on how to get a foot in the door. This workshop will be run with Richard Willis’s workshop. One ticket for both workshops!

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance
N.B. All dates / times are provisional and subject to final confirmation

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Hugh Williams

Hugh Williams held a number of senior editorial and management posts in the BBC before moving to the development of television over broadband more than ten years ago. He is currently Director of Programmes for the Internet Company, Talk Talk. His “Fifty Things You Need To Know About World History” was published by Harper Collins earlier this year, following the success  of his first book, “Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History”.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance
N.B. All dates / times are provisional and subject to final confirmation

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Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History
Price: GBP 14.49

35 used & new available from GBP 2.00

Anna Beer

Anna Beer is a biographer with a particular interest in the relationship between literature, politics and history. She is a University Lecturer in English Literature and has published an academic study of Sir Walter Ralegh’s life and works and a biography of his wife, Bess Ralegh. Her most recent book, a biography of John Milton, was published by Bloomsbury in 2008.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance
N.B. All dates / times are provisional and subject to final confirmation

BOOKS:
Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot
Bess: The Life of Lady Ralegh, Wife of Sir Walter
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Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot
Price: GBP 12.74

43 used & new available from GBP 0.10

Ian Mortimer

Ian Mortimer is well known for challenging conservative views about history and making readers look at subjects in fresh and radical ways.

His vibrant best-seller, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, redefined our responses to the past as does his latest book, 1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance
N.B. All dates / times are provisional and subject to final confirmation

LINKS:
www.IanMortimer.com
Interview with Ian Mortimer
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The Time-traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
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7 used & new available from GBP 24.92

Jeremy Musson

Jeremy Musson is a writer, broadcaster, architectural historian, and a former National Trust curator.

From 1998-2007 he was the Architectural Editor of Country Life; he was also the presenter of the BBC 2 series The Curious House Guest screened in 2005 and 2006, and author of The English Manor House (1999), How to Read a Country House (2006), The Country Houses of Sir John Vanbrugh (2008) and most recently Up and Down Stairs: The History of the Country House Servant (2009). He lives in Cambridge with his wife and two daughters.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance
N.B. All dates / times are provisional and subject to final confirmation

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LINKS:
www.jeremymusson.com
Up and Down Stairs by Jeremy Musson | The Guardian | January 2010
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How to Read a Country House
Price: GBP 16.00

48 used & new available from GBP 2.86

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