8:41am Monday 3rd August 2009
By Telegraph & Argus
Jo Brand, Will Self, Stuart Maconie and Joan Bakewell are among the latest names announced for this autumn’s Ilkley Literature Festival.
Ilkley will be buzzing with authors, poets, broadcasters and performers in October, as festival events span various venues across the town.
With 190 events planned, the festival is set to bring writers from around the country to talk about such topics as guerrilla gardening, historical biography, romantic fiction and contemporary poetry.
Getting in before the festival officially leaps off the page is Ilkley’s own Alan Titchmarsh, telling all from his memoirs, swiftly followed by Alan Bennett who will open the festival by reading from his family memoir A Life Like Other People’s.
Novelist David Peace returns to Yorkshire with his new novel, Occupied City, set in post-Second World War Japan, and Keighley’s Simon Beaufoy, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Slumdog Millionaire, will be making an appearance.
Olympic rower James Cracknell, comic Jo Brand, and writer/broadcasters Stuart Maconie and Joan Bakewell discuss more factual matters with their accounts of trips taken and lives lived.
To coincide with the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth – and 150 years to the day since he visited Ilkley in October, 1859 – the festival will include leading science writers Lewis Wolpert, Christopher Lloyd and Jim Moore. There will also be Darwin reading groups and workshops.
Writers Val McDermid, Sophie Hannah, Peter Robinson, Al Kennedy, Salley Vickers and Jeremy Dyson will be discussing their recent novels, and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, James Martin and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall discuss food writing.
Journalists have a presence at this year’s festival, with Michael Frayn bringing a collection of articles he wrote for the Observer in the Sixties and Seventies in Travels With A Typewriter, David Aaronovitch and Francis Wheen debating conspiracy theories and mass paranoia, and Observer columnist Henry Porter reading from his new political thriller, The Dying Light.
Will Self and Melvyn Bragg both return to Ilkley with collections from their Independent columns and Radio 4 programmes, BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner reflects on some inspiring journeys around the world and the Guardian’s Northern editor, Martin Wainwright, finds his True North.
There are a range of writers attending the festival who have been writing about either themselves or others. Lynn Barber, Michael Mansfield QC, Lord Paddy Ashdown, Gyles Brandreth and Diana Quick will be talking about their forthcoming autobiographies, while Aeronwy Thomas and Andrew Lycett discuss Dylan Thomas’s life and work, and John Carey ponders on William Golding and Tristram Hunt on Engels.
History, be it fact or fiction, is well-represented this year, with Hallie Rubenhold and David Lascelles reviewing Lady Worsley’s Whim: An Eighteenth Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal And Divorce, which has links to Harewood House. Jenny Uglow looks at Charles II and, from more recent history, Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Peter Lazenby will consider the miners’ strike 30 years on.
For the younger generation there’s an exciting line up too; Skellig author David Almond will be making his only festival appearance at Ilkley, along with Blue Peter book award-winner Anita Ganeri, writer of Horrible Geography.
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