Programme 2010
THURSDAY 24th JUNE
Tickets can be purchased from the University's online store.
Children's eventAlison Murray - Apple Pie ABC
A brand new book with gorgeous characters to fall in love with - and to help teach your tot their alphabet.
Traditional verse is retold with wit, filled with charm and illustrated with tremendous
style by an exciting debut artist.
Follow the funny exploits of the utterly lovable pup as he does his
best to get his paws on the pie!
R - ready
S - steady
T - time to go for it...
Apple Pie ABC is bound to be loved by young children and adults
alike who will undoubtedly savour the story again and again.
Dundee Literary Festival will take Alison and her tales to a variety
of venues in Dundee - signed books will be on sale at the Literary
Festival.
LIVEWIRE
9.00am
Free, no ticket required
The Creative Writing course at the University of Dundee is one of the most innovative and exciting in the country, producing fabulous work from the students.
Come and hear them read and discuss the course. A chance to catch the future of British publishing, before they're discovered.
Jackie KayIntroduced by Gail Low
10.00am
£3, concession £2
The story of Jackie Kay’s life is as fascinating and complex as her literary works, many of which spring from her biography and all
concerned with the nature of identity.
'A while ago I tracked down my Nigerian birth father and discovered
him to be a born-again Christian, who didn’t want his current family
to know anything about me. 'If people were to know about You,' he
said, 'they would lose their faith in God.' Heavens, I said. I hadn’t
realized I was that powerful. He had my hands, my father, my gestures.
Red Dust Road is a book about belonging and beliefs, strangers and family,
biology and destiny. What makes us who we are? My adoption is a story
that has happened to me. I couldn’t make it up.'
Come and hear one of Scotland’s most exciting voices discuss her life
and her work.
An Orcadian Summer
11.00am
£3, concession £2
We are delighted to welcome three different voices with one location - The Orkneys - in common.
Duncan McLean was born in Aberdeenshire and has lived in Orkney since 1992. His first book was a collection of short stories called Bucket of Tongues, and since then he has published several more, including two novels and a collection of plays. Recent projects include two plays for the National Theatre of Scotland, ‘Aalst’ and ‘Long Gone Lonesome’, which tells the story of the reclusive Shetland musician Thomas Fraser. He is
currently working on a new play and a novel.
John Aberdein’s first novel Amande's Bed, evoking the events of 1956 in his native working-class city, won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award in 2005. His follow-up, Strip the Willow, set in a barely-fictionalised Uberdeen/Leopardeen, is a fierce dystopia leavened by love, and is shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Council Fiction of the Year Award 2010.
Alison Flett, who moved from Edinburgh to Orkney, is an award-winning poet and novelist who writes phonetically (sometimes) with a strong injection of Scots (always) and without a care for risk. Come and hear her read, a surprising and exciting experience.
Dundee Poets
12.30pm
£5, (including sandwich and tea or coffee)
The University of Dundee’s Royal Literary Fellows are both poets with a story to tell. Gordon Meade and Tracey Herd will be introduced by Jim Stewart from Creative Writing.
Tracy Herd’s work is filled with powerful tensions between female vulnerability and black humour. Her rewritings of conventional portrayals of femininity in romantic, pulp and adolescent fiction subject these familiar worlds to violent distortions, but her work is also capable of a great tenderness. Her first poetry collection, No Hiding Place, Bloodaxe 1996, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and her third collection, The Single Girl, was published by Bloodaxe in 2007, was a PBS Recommendation.
Gordon Meade was born in 1957 in Perthshire and now lives in Fife. Widely published in the UK and abroad, his work is available in five collections of poems - most recently The Private Zoo (2008) and The Cleaner Fish (2006) - both with Arrowhead Press. From 2008/2010 he was one of two Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellows at The University of Dundee.
Alan WarnerIntroduced by Anna Day, Festival Director
1.30pm
£3, concession £2
Join Alan Warner, one of the most innovative Scottish writers of his generation, as he reads from his striking new novel Stars in the Bright Sky. The six Sopranos of Warner’s 1998 novel reunite at Gatwick
Airport to improvise a reunion getaway. Superbly sensitive the rhythms
of everyday speech and crammed with the paraphernalia of
contemporary consumer living, this riotous and subtly satirical comedy
of youthful (over)exuberance confirms Warner as a brilliant talent.
Alan Warner was nominated by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best
of Young British Novelists' and won critical acclaim with his novels, The
Sopranos, Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, The Man Who Walks
and The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven.
Christopher ReidIn conversation with Catherine Lockerbie
3.00pm
£3, concession £2
Christopher Reid’s beautiful collection of poetry made him the first poet to take the main Costa Book Award in 10 years. A Scattering includes four poetic sequences, the first written during his wife's final illness and the remaining three at intervals following her death in 2005.
The judges described A Scattering as 'intensely moving, compelling and
honest. What Christopher Reid did was to take a personal tragedy and to
make the emotion and the situation universal.'
Christopher Reid was poetry editor at Faber and Faber and has won the
Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the Signal Poetry
Award. His edition of Letters of Ted Hughes appeared in paperback last
year.
Christopher Reid will be interviewed by Catherine Lockerbie, a former
Director of the Edinburgh Book Festival and a graduate of the University of
Dundee .
John CareyIn conversation with Kirsty Gunn
4.30pm
£3, concession £2
John Carey’s new biography, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote
Lord of the Flies, with its revelation of an attempted rape by
Golding, has caused uproar in the literary world. It is yet another
example of John Carey’s ability to delve into the lives of the most
accomplished writers, examining their past and their work - past
subjects include his celebrated biographies of Dickens and Donne.
John Carey, a rare creature, an academic who writes shrewdly,
wittily and economically on a wide range of subjects, will be
interviewed by Kirsty Gunn and will be discussing the new book,
his entire body of work and how a Scholarship boy has flourished
in his distinguished career as Merton Professor Emeritus at Oxford
University.
Publishing Panel
5.30pm
£5 / concession £3
Our annual event - a fantastic opportunity to hear the most important people in publishing discuss the ways - old and new - that new writers have of getting their voices heard. Ebooks, small magazines, traditional agents - come and find out which route is right for you.
The panel will be chaired by David Graham and will spill the secrets of the world of books before taking questions from the audience which can be about your own work. A wonderful opportunity to take one step closer to getting your work published.
The panel will include Pru Rowlandson, Will Atkinson, Bob McDevitt, Jamie Byng and Kirsty Gunn
