The next Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival will be 21-23 September 2012

In the meantime you might be interested in seeing what’s on at the
Budleigh Salterton Jazz Festival which runs from 20th to 22nd April 2012.

Visit the 2011 Festival Photo Gallery here…
You can see below a short video showing highlights of the 2011 festival.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some of the writers who appeared at the 2011 Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival included …

• Hilary Mantel • Carol Ann Duffy • Gillian Clarke • Mavis Cheek
• AL Kennedy • Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall • Josceline Dimbleby
• Michael Morpurgo • Sir Roy Strong • Robin Hanbury-Tennison

Please have a browse through the Literary Festival Programme to read about our other events.

To be kept abreast of new events, please click here to sign up to our email newsletter and we’ll let you know about them as soon as they are announced.

We also introduced in 2011, a Budleigh Good Read, a lively book discussion forum which appealed to Reading Groups. Sue MacGregor hosted this event.

Part of the Literary Festival’s ethos is to entertain the whole community, and to this end, the programme includes pre-school storybook reading, a poetry workshop, poetry recitals involving local schools, book sales, an art talk about a celebrated book illustrator, and even a walking tour with a literary flavour around Budleigh Salterton.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival is supported by:

•
• Everys Solicitors • Palmers Whitton and Laing • The Tolkien Trust •
• Norman Family Charitable Trust • Creative Engine Room Web Design
• & Marketing • The Farm Marketing Communications • Devon County
• Council • Arts & Culture at the University of Exeter • Simcoe House •
• Blackwell Publishers • Budleigh Salterton Library •
• Budleigh Salterton Tourist Information Centre • Budleigh Salterton Town
• Council • Councillor Christine Channon • Michael Jackaman •
• Sue Lawley • Hugh Williams • P.J. White •

…and other Literary Festival Friends and supporters who have kindly sponsored or contributed to the Festival.

Other large UK literary festivals & literature festivals in South West England include:
The Telegraph Ways With Words Literary Festival at Dartington Hall
The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival
Port Eliot Festival
Bath Literary Festival

We also recommend Wordquest Devon – an opportunity for people to immerse themselves in Devon’s literature while exploring the county’s dramatic landscapes.

Looking forward to welcoming you to the 2012 Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival.

Literary Festival UK

Literary Festival Devon

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Imagining History

10am Public Hall
Sunday 18 September 2011

Chair: Professor Helen Taylor

Is it possible to bring together the novelist’s imagination and the historian’s quest for accuracy and create something that will excite and satisfy everyone?

For the last ten years Sarah Dunant has been working to bring the rich, often hidden history of the Italian Renaissance to life.

After three best-selling novels dramatising women’s lives, she is in the middle of writing a novel about the Borgias, one of Italy’s most powerful and notorious families.

But how much of history is actually imagined anyway, and if so, how does one get to the truth and fashion it into a really good read?

Some best-selling titles by Sarah Dunant include: Transgressions, Mapping the Edge, The Birth of Venus, and In the Company of the Courtesan.

LINK: www.sarahdunant.com

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance

Box office opens 11th July 2011

Tickets are available from the Tourist Information Centre on the High Street opposite Temple Church.

Telephone Budleigh Salterton 01395 445275
or visit www.visitbudleigh.com

Words

7.30pm Public Hall
Saturday 17 September 2011

Chair: Professor Martin Sorrell

Get ready to be amused. Celebrated for her irony, originality and dead-pan wit, A. L. Kennedy is a writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is also a popular stand-up comedian, making regular appearances at comedy clubs and the Edinburgh Fringe.

A.L. Kennedy is passionate about language. She will talk about how we use words, are abused by words and the absurdities of the writer’s life.

“You can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone.” (from Original Bliss by A.L. Kennedy)

A.L. Kennedy is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Warwick.

In 2007, she won the Lannan Literary Award and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Her novel of that same year, Day, was named Costa Book of the Year in the Costa Book Awards.

She reviews for The Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald and the Daily Telegraph, is a contributor to the Guardian, and has been a judge for both the Booker Prize for Fiction (1996) and The Guardian First Book Award (2001).

AL Kennedy’s excellent The Blue Book reviewed here: The Blue Book by AL Kennedy – review

LINK: www.a-l-kennedy.co.uk

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance

Tickets are available from the Tourist Information Centre on the High Street opposite Temple Church.

Telephone Budleigh Salterton 01395 445275
or visit www.visitbudleigh.comw

Full Fathom Five
- a Poetry making and sharing workshop

10am – 12noon Masonic Hall
Saturday 17 September 2011

Chair: Professor Martin Sorrell

Join tutor and prize-winning poet Chris Waters for a session of poetry making and sharing.

Taking as our theme, our myriad connections with the sea, we will read, discuss, explore, invent, improvise and quietly compose.

Participants are invited to bring along a relevant poem of their own or a favourite by an established poet. All writers and poetry lovers are welcome.

His poetry collection, Arisaig, was published by Mudlark Press in 2010; Chris Waters was a finalist in the Plough Poetry Prize competition in the same year.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance

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Catch of the Day

Some words are just sprats,
but may be set
to catch a shining mackerel.

Others wind up in nets,
thrash and flounder,
only to end up overboard.

Some are dive-caught,
prised away by hand
deep down among the currents,

but these, today’s,
going for sustainable,
are line-caught,

line by line by line.

This poem was written in 2011 especially for
Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival by Chris Waters.

Chris Waters is a member of Moor Poets

A Dartmoor-based group of writers with the aim of encouraging
creative writing in people of all abilities.

LINK: www.moorpoets.org.uk

Box office opens 11th July 2011

Tickets are available from the Tourist Information Centre on the High Street opposite Temple Church.

Telephone Budleigh Salterton 01395 445275
or visit www.visitbudleigh.com

The Great Explorers

2pm Public Hall
Friday 16 September 2011

Chair: Roger Bass

Celebrated by the Sunday Times as ‘the greatest explorer of the past 20 years’, Robin Hanbury-Tenison will enthrall us with stories and images from The Great Explorers, a collection of vivid biographical essays and portraits featuring forty of the world’s most intrepid explorers, past and present.

This beautifully illustrated book also features an impressive array of expert authors – including academics, historians and travel writers – who describe the lives, motives and passions of these outstanding individuals.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison is a well-known author, film-maker, conservationist and campaigner.

Author of numerous books including: A Question of Survival, A Pattern of Peoples, Mulu: the Rainforest, The Yanomami, Fragile Eden, The Oxford Book of Exploration, and his two autobiographies: Worlds Apart and Worlds Within.

Prepare to be entertained and enlightened by this fascinating talk.

LINK: www.robinsbooks.co.uk

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance

Box office opens 11th July 2011

Tickets are available from the Tourist Information Centre on the High Street opposite Temple Church.

Telephone Budleigh Salterton 01395 445275
or visit www.visitbudleigh.com

In My Granny’s Kitchen
- Home Cooking from the Forties to the Noughties

2pm Public Hall
Sunday 18 September 2011

Chair: Barbara Farley

The family kitchen is the focal point for Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall’s popular and inspirational books about family life.

She gives appealing, helpful and light hearted practical advice on how to be a good granny – words of wisdom passed down to her as a child from her own grandmother.

A versatile writer, horticulturist and garden designer, winner of two gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show, Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall is a remarkable talent.

From 2005 to 2007 she wrote a popular weekly column for The Times about family life. She has also written for the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Woman’s Weekly, The Garden, The English Garden and Gardens Illustrated.

Titles on the theme of being a grandmother include: The Good Granny Guide: Or How to Be a Modern Grandmother, The Good Granny Diary, The Good Granny Cookbook, and The Good Granny Companion.

Her energy is infectious and inspiring.

LINK: www.goodgranny.com

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance

Box office opens 11th July 2011

Tickets are available from the Tourist Information Centre on the High Street opposite Temple Church.

Telephone Budleigh Salterton 01395 445275
or visit www.visitbudleigh.com

A Budleigh Good Read

2pm Public Hall
Saturday 17 September 2011

Introduced by Sue Lawley

Sue MacGregor, Sarah Dunant and A.L. Kennedy will be talking about their selected books.

Selected books: Star of the Sea, Joseph O’Connor; Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion; and A Man Could Stand Up, Ford Madox Ford.

Producer, reporter and broadcaster Sue MacGregor has selected Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor.

The Irish famine of the 1840s was one the greatest social catastrophes of 19th-century Europe and the historical setting for this novel. The “Star of the Sea” of the title is a famine ship which makes the journey from Ireland to New York with a disparate cargo of passengers leaving behind the lives they have known for a new beginning.

Star of the Sea was first published in 2004.

Sarah Dunant has chosen Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion.

An early collection of the essays and journalism of Joan Didion which describes her experiences in California during the 1960s. It takes its title from the poem The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats.

The contents of this book are reprinted in Didion’s We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction published in 2006.

A. L. Kennedy will be talking about A Man Could Stand Up by Ford Madox Ford.

The third novel in a four-novel sequence, collectively titled Paradise’s End, the story takes place on Armistice Day, November 1918. Ford served as an officer in the Welsh Regiment – a life vividly depicted in the novels.

A Man Could Stand Up was first published in 1926.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance

Box office opens 11th July 2011

Tickets are available from the Tourist Information Centre on the High Street opposite Temple Church.

Telephone Budleigh Salterton 01395 445275
or visit www.visitbudleigh.com

The Mirror and The Light

12noon Temple Church
Saturday 17 September 2011

Chair: Professor Helen Taylor

We have the unique privilege of hearing Hilary Mantel read from her new work in progress, The Mirror and the Light, sequel to the great Wolf Hall.

Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2009 Man Booker prize for Wolf Hall, a penetrating novel about Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII, is now writing a sequel, The Mirror and the Light. Her new novel follows Thomas Cromwell to the heights of his power, and chronicles his fall and execution in the summer of 1540.

Hilary Mantel is an acclaimed English novelist, short story writer and critic.

Her work, ranges in subject from personal memoir to historical fiction. Set in a myriad places and times – from Tudor England, eighteenth century Ireland and France, South Africa in the apartheid era, a Peak District village in the 1950s to modern-day Saudi Arabia – her talent and curiosity in evoking times past and present, and the characters inhabiting these worlds, is audacious.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival Appearance

Box office opens 11th July 2011

Tickets are available from the Tourist Information Centre on the High Street opposite Temple Church.

Telephone Budleigh Salterton 01395 445275
or visit www.visitbudleigh.com