edinburgh
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In the run-up to the Salt gig at Utter! on the Free Fringe, I’ll be posting a poem by, and a mini-interview with, the other readers. They’ll all be answering the same questions, which I’m hoping will be an interesting exercise in itself. First up is Julia Bird, whose collection Hannah and the Monk was
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Just a quick note that Alexander Hutchison has been confirmed for the Salt Scotland launch. He joins me, Rob A. Mackenzie, Wena Poon and Ryan van Winkle, with guest Tim Turnbull. It’s shaping up to be a very good line-up indeed, if I do say so myself. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing Wena read.
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Please note that the times for the Salt Scotland launch reading on 29 May have changed. You are asked to arrive at 4:30 pm for a 5 pm start and we have to be out of the building at 7 pm. I’ve changed the time in the diary page and on the original post. When
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Salt is opening a new Scottish arm based in Glasgow and plans to extend its Scottish list significantly. On Saturday 29 May, there’lll be a series of events in Edinburgh to launch and celebrate this new venture, culminating in a reading of new fiction and poetry 4:30 pm for a 5 pm start, finishing at
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Hidden Door is a brand new mini-festival of the arts that takes place at the end of this month. On 30 and 31 January, 30 bands, 40 artists, 10 poets and 10 film makers will take over the Roxy Art House in Edinburgh and transform the space with an art maze, hidden stages and innovative
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Blackwell’s on Thursday was a good night. A really varied bunch of perfomers — poetry, fiction, non-fiction and folk music — in a great venue, despite the traffic noise. It was a good audience, too. Heartening to see a mix of kent faces and new. Good on the bookshop for putting on such a good
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Anyone who has read David Gaffney‘s hilarious, dark, moving and imaginative collection of micro fiction Sawn-Off Tales or who enjoyed his sawn-off operas on The Verb a while back will doubtless want to check out his Fringe show, I reckon. Click the flyer image to go to the Fringe web page for the show. ‘Office
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Here is the full information for my reading tomorrow at the Four Hour Festival: Venue: Evolution Cafe, Evolution House. This is the entrance to eca on the West Port. It’s a big glass building right on the corner of the crossroads, apparently. Time: I’m on at 3pm. The event starts at 1pm with Shore Poet
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To the Book Festival yesterday for a reading by three Lithuanian poets: Eugenijus Alisanka, Gintaras Grajauskas and Sigitas Parulskis, representing one half of the anthology Six Lithuanian Poets. It was a fairly small audience, not even filling up the smallest of the festival’s performance tents. A pity, really, because the absentees missed themselves: it was
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My 2008 Edinburgh festival season began last night with a trip to the Usher Hall to hear the BBC SSO under Ilan Volkov perform Thomas Adès’s Tevot and Olivier Messiaen’s final work, Éclairs sur L’Au-delà. Tevot, a recent composition, was described in the programme note (which you can find here) as “effectively Adès’s second symphony”;
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More excitement here yesterday when I discovered that “Yasser” was on at the Assembly Rooms this Fringe. Why? Well, it’s written by someone I know: the Dutch Moroccan novelist Abdelkader Benali. I haven’t seen or heard from Abdel for a long while, but I keep loosely up to date with his life and career through
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You know, I haven’t written anything for weeks. It’s not a case of writer’s block as much as one of writer’s break, one of those fallow periods you have now and then. In past years, I’ve found the summer a surprisingly unproductive season: I never write on holiday (so I no longer expect myself to);
Amy Jo Philip 