Here’s a round-up of the Literature Department’s recent
news stories.
Suzanne Joinson, a literature advisor for the British Council’s Literature Department, won the New Writing Venture Award for Creative Non-Fiction on 12 September 2007. Her unusual tale 'Laila Ahmed' pieces together family relationships, culture, memory and history and was inspired by a box of letters found in Deptford Market. Click here to read the full story and find out more about the award.
The final year of Animating Literature in North and Central Europe kicked off with a workshop in the Ukraine to bring together 28 teachers who have been working on British Council reading projects in their own countries. The workshop provided the teachers with an opportunity to form partnerships to connect their students across Europe. Taking, British Council online resources, UK expertise in reader development and the Finnish model of NetLibris as our starting points, the teachers formed partnerships and planned their programmes in the city of Odessa, with the city’s statue of Pushkin reinforcing the literary theme of the week. Groups of students in different counties will read the same short stories and poems online, taken from the New Writing anthology, BritLit and Reading the City resources and hold reading circles in their country group. They will then use the EnCompass Culture website to have monthly online contact with their partners in at least two other countries. The teachers will act as facilitators, and help the students use the texts as the basis for exploring each others’ cultures and Britain today. Discussions will start online in October.
Francesca Beard has been on tour in Vietnam and the Philippines this autumn to run workshops with local poets and to perform in various venues as part of the British Council’s East Asia Animating Literature project.
The British Council in Palestine is to run a literature-focussed programme in partnership with Goldsmiths, University of London, and Palestinian universities on the topic of Postmodernism. The meetings will take place in the form of video conferences; there will be one meeting per month for two hours, from October 2007 to spring 2008. Each meeting will consist of a half-hour presentation by someone from Goldsmiths contextualising the particular aspect of Postmodernism under discussion. Following that will be a half-hour workshop between both sides on an essay, circulated in advance, addressing the topic for that month’s meeting. The final hour will consist of a discussion of one primary text, partly in the light of the critical issues raised by the presentation and essay.
Four Bengali writers – Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Bani Basu, Nabarun Bhattacharya, all from Kolkata, and Selina Hossain, from Dhaka - presented their work in front of sell-out crowds at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August. The event was chaired by the British Council’s Director Literature, Susie Nicklin. As part of the Writers of the World series at the festival, the Kolkata delegation was also making a case for their city as UNESCO’s next World City of Literature title (currently held by Edinburgh). Colleagues in Kolkata and Edinburgh have been working behind the scenes to connect the literary and publishing communities in the two cities, putting together plans for Kolkata to place its bid to UNESCO in October 2007 and also working alongside the Booksellers and Publishers Guild to showcase Scotland as the focal theme for Kolkata Book Fair in 2009.
Teen fiction author Matt Whyman held a three-day creative writing workshop with budding young authors in Sana'a, Yemen from 30 July – 1 August. Throughout the trip Matt kept a fascinating weblog on the British Council's EnCompass Culture website, which you can read under the July and August 2007 archives.
Issue 12 of the final edition of the Crossing Borders magazine series is available online. The magazine is edited by Becky Clarke, presenting the creative work, short stories and poetry of around 36 Crossing Borders participants over a year.
Monica Arac de Nyeko, a Crossing Borders participant from Uganda, won the £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing 2007 with her touching love story 'Jambula Tree' from African Love Stories (Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2006). In addition, the judges highly commended Crossing Borders participant Billy Kahora from Kenya for his story ‘Treadmill Love’ from The Obituary Tango (Jacana/New Internationalist, 2006).
New Writing 15 (Granta, 2007) is the British Council's annual anthology of the finest contemporary writing in fiction, non-fiction and poetry, selected by Bernardine Evaristo and Maggie Gee. Contributors include: Moniza Ali, Julian Barnes Anita Desai, Helen Dunmore, Alasdair Gray, Doris Lessing, Nii Ayikwei Parkes and many more. Visit the New Writing website for more information and to read selected texts grouped into 12 themed sections for New Writing 12, New Writing 13 and New Writing 14. A new theme is added every month for New Writing 15.
London was the city of honour for this year’s festival in Toulouse, France, where 15 British writers met and performed to around 5000 French readers in various venues around the city. Readings were held in French and English, and other artforms were celebrated too – such as photography, painting, dance, music, circus and street theatre – in what was a unique cross-disciplinary animation of literature.
At this year’s London Book Fair the British Council co-hosted with the Arts Council a series of panel discussions called Wicked Issues. These were led by well-known writers and key members of the UK publishing industry. Meanwhile, the International Young Publisher of the Year (IYPY) and UK Young Publisher of the Year (UKYPY) awards took place. IYPY is an innovative collaboration between the British Council and London Book Fair to identify and nurture the international publishing industry’s next generation of leaders. Central to this concept is the belief that the UK – both at and beyond London Book Fair – is a fertile ground for international networking. UKPY is a new award (as well as a British Book Industry Award, also known as a ‘Nibbie’), again a collaboration between the British Council and London Book Fair, recognising the potential of an individual to be a future leader of the publishing sector in the UK and, indeed, internationally. Further details about the award, including who won and the prize of a placement in India, can be seen here.
The Literature department has compiled a list of books, short films, websites, reading activities and performance artists on the theme of reading the city for the EnCompass Culture website. The booklist consists of: fiction and poetry; teenage fiction; and teenage graphic novels. The list is divided into: websites for project organisers; football; websites for readers; and blogs and discussions. You can now download the booklet and read extracts from a selection of the listed books by visiting the Reading the City web page.
The theme of this year’s conference was 'Reading lives: the literature of life and the life of literature in intercultural education'. The event, held on 30 March - 5 April, was a great success – over 52 delegates from 34 countries attended, and speakers included the writers and academics Jonathan Bate, Peter Childs, Rachel Cusk, Victoria Glendinning, Andrew O'Hagan, Blake Morrison, Ankhi Mukherjee, Grace Nichols and Anne Whitehead.
The Literature department hosted a party on London’s Southbank on 20 March to celebrate over 500 entries being entered into the Contemporary Writers database. Joolz Denby was the 500th name to be added.
Power in the Voice is a three-year programme that provides an opportunity for young people across Southern Africa and the UK to celebrate and express themselves creatively through their voices. It taps into the wealth of oral and performance traditions, the rhythms, the sounds and the messages of speech and song. Power in the Voice will enable young people aged 14+ to develop skills in performance poetry, storytelling, rap and a variety of related arts through taking part in an exciting programme of competitions, collaborative workshops, exhibitions and talks. The project will also act as a focus for an exchange of skills between UK spoken word artists and Southern African artists. All of this activity will culminate in the Power in the Voice International Festival in Southern Africa in May 2008, attended by artists and competition winners from seven countries: Botswana, Mauritius, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe and the UK.
This is a programme to promote literature development and debate of contemporary issues through radio. Participants from Uganda worked with mentors selected by the University of Lancaster to prepare radio scripts through live workshops and the Crossing Borders website private discussion boards and chat area. The stories and live discussions have been broadcast on Ugandan radio and podcasts can be downloaded for free from the Crossing Borders website.
From March to August 2007, the British Council and AHRC-funded ‘Devolving Diasporas’ team worked together to link readers around the world and learn more about how readers in different locations understand the same text. This project has looked at reading in a diasporic context. Books include Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Andrea Levy's Small Island, Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Jackie Kay's The Adoption Papers. Live web-chats have been hosted on enCompass Culture between reading groups in England, Scotland, Canada, India, and Nigeria.
What is teen fiction capable of? In February 2007, authors Matt Whyman and Jamila Gavin travelled to Yekaterinburg, Samara, Volgograd, Sochi and Moscow to run a series of creative writing workshops for students, teachers and librarians. There have also been video-links between some of the cities, and the writers kept an entertaining weblog throughout their journey on the enCompass Culture website
As part of the Animating Literature East Asia programme, 'Learning English Though Literature' was a seminar that took place in Kuala Lumpur for English language and literature education professionals. The aims and objectives of Animating Literature East Asia are:
- To build an East Asian network of practitioners, policy-makers and theorists working in the field of literature, language and culture and allied disciplines
- To promote literature teaching as a tool for English language learning and intercultural understanding
- To engage participants with new UK writers and writing and the tools necessary to work with them in the classroom
- To showcase UK and British Council excellence in ELT teaching
- To bring together upper-secondary and tertiary level literature educators to attempt to close the gap between these levels of education
- To develop potential partners for follow-up project work fitting with British Council objectives.
This project was launched late January 2007, with an aim to build a virtual community of writers exploring Arabic and North African writing in English. Participants selected by competitions are mentored by UK creative writing tutors and take part in live workshops and online mentoring using a purpose-built website. Participants use a private workshop area where they can upload their work in progress and participate in online tutorials using web boards and chat. The resulting work is then showcased on the site.
The Walberberg Seminar is the largest and longest running annual Literature seminar held overseas. The 22nd Seminar ran from 25 – 28 January 2007 at Akademie Schmockwitz, Berlin on the theme ‘You Cannot Be Serious’, chaired by Glenn Patterson and featuring: Wendy Cope, Patricia Duncker, Anne Enright, Jamie Mackendrick and Patrick Neate. The seminar was attended by 45 participants from Germany and neighbouring countries, including a broad mix of academic critics, professors of English (with many from the younger generation), publishers, journalists and translators.
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