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Galle Literary Festival 2010 |
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"The most companionable of all festivals" Michael Morpurgo |
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Now an established feature of the international literary calendar, the Galle Literary Festival continues to evolve and explore new ground for the fourth year running and took place in and around the World Heritage Site of Galle Fort. The festival this year was another world class event providing locals and international visitors with a chance to come and enjoy their favourite Sri Lankan and International authors and engage in conversations about a wide selection of books and topics.
This premier festival's main focus is on celebrating Sri Lankan literature and raise awareness of the increasing depth and diversity of Sri Lankan writings in English, and to encourage and stimulate further writing in English within Sri Lanka and Asia. Furthermore to establish a healthy dialogue between participants and spectators, discussing topical issues and providing a platform for vigorous debate.
This year was bigger than ever as the British Council sponsored the celebrated detective writer Ian Rankin, the Emmy Award winning writer playwright Michael Frayn, critically acclaimed UK writer Claire Tomalin and one of UK’s leading writers Louise Doughty. They participated in various discussions and events during the festival.
The five-day programme was filled with writing workshops, panel discussions, topical debates, literary lunches and dinners, poetry readings and a children’s program. Alongside the writers, the Festival this year featured exemplary performance artists from Sri Lanka. The Chamber Music Society of Colombo returned by popular demand to give a special concert in the Dutch Reformed Church in Galle, and it included the world premiere of a new composition by its resident composer Stephen Allen. The Festival also hosted two special performances by the Ravibandu Vidyapati Drum Ensemble and the Chitrasena Dance Company.
More information can be found on the official Festival website.
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IAN RANKIN |
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Ian Rankin, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, is an award-winning Scottish Crime writer. His well-known series of Inspector Rebus novels are best-sellers on several continents. The series, which started with Knots and Crosses (1987), has been hugely successful, accounting for 10% of all crime book sales in the UK. |
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The books now routinely sell half a million copies within the first three months of printing, and have been translated into 36 languages. The novels are acclaimed for their contribution to the 'Tartan Noir' genre. He was a Literature tutor at the University of Edinburgh where he retains an involvement with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Rankin has been elected as a Hawthornden Fellow and won the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He has also won two Crime Writers' Association (CWA) Dagger prizes for short stories and in 1997 the CWA Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction for Black and Blue, which was also short-listed for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for best novel. In 2008 he won the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Author of the Year, for Exit Music. He has honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Abertay Dundee, and the University of St Andrews and, in 2005, from the University of Hull. In June 2002 he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the Golden Jubilee Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to literature. |
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MICHAEL FRAYN |
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Michael Frayn was born in London. He began his career as a journalist - first as a reporter on The Guardian, then as a columnist for The Guardian and The Observer. He has written sixteen plays, including Noises Off, Copenhagen, Democracy, and most recently Afterlife. |
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He has also translated for the theatre, mostly Chekhov and other plays from the Russian, and written a number of screenplays, including Clockwise, starring John Cleese. He has published ten novels, including The Tin Men, Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong, and Spies; various collections of articles, including Collected Columns, Stage Directions, and Travels with a Typewriter; and two works of philosophy, Constructions and The Human Touch. He is married to the biographer Claire Tomalin. |
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CLAIRE TOMALIN |
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Claire Tomalin was born in London. After graduating from Newnham College, Cambridge, she worked in publishing before switching to journalism, becoming literary editor of both the New Statesman magazine and the Sunday Times newspaper. She is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft and Katherine Mansfield. |
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Her account of Charles Dickens' relationship with the actress Nelly Ternan, The Invisible Woman:The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, (1990) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography), the NCR Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Hawthornden Prize. It was followed by Mrs. Jordan's Profession, a biography of the actress Dora Jordan, consort to William IV. Her play The Winter Wife (1991) is based on her own biography of Katherine Mansfield. Claire Tomalin lives in London with her husband, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn. Her biography of the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys,(2002) won the Samuel Pepys Award, and the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year award. Her book Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man, (2006) was shortlisted for the British Book Awards Biography of the Year. |
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LOUISE DOUGHTY |
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Louise Doughty is a novelist, playwright and critic. She is the author of five novels; Crazy Paving, Dance with Me, Honey-Dew, Fires in the Dark and Stone Cradle, and one work of non-fiction, A Novel in a Year, based on her highly popular newspaper column of the same name, which includes tips and exercises that help one build raw material for one’s own book. She has also written five plays for radio. |
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She has worked widely as a critic and broadcaster in the UK, where she lives, and was a judge for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In April 2009, in celebration of the 5th anniversary of British Council’s Writeclique writer’s programme, Louise Doughty came to Sri Lanka, where she ran a 3 day master class on Creative Writing, and continued to work closely with the participants on their work for a period of three months. She currently runs the Creative Writing Programme at the Faber Academy. |
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