readings attended
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It’s August, there’s a downpour a day and Edinburgh has brigadooned into the Radio 4 consciousness once again. Must be festival time. Of course, by “festival” I mean not only the Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, but the Festival of Spirituality and
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There was a good crowd in Mai Thai–the new Shore Poets venue–on Sunday night to hear Alan Hill, Jim C Wilson and Matthew Hollis. The readers strained a little bit to make themselves heard at the back, so I think we’ll might be using a small PA in future. Nonetheless, it was a good reading.
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Rilke has been a significant figure for me for a while, although there’s much of his work I’ve yet to read. When I lived in Berlin in the early 1990s, a friend gave me his collected poems in German for Chirstmas. The same friend later gave me the Letters to a Young Poet (in English,
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On Saturday night, the Shore Poets celebrated Stewart Conn‘s 70th birthday at the Counting House in Edinburgh. The evening, which was open to the public and more or less sold out with various bodies from the poetry world, involved readings from a number of poets whom Stewart admires and counts among his friends, including Anne
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Went to hear the fine Gaelic poet, publisher and scholar Derick Thomson (or Ruaraidh MacThomais in Gaelic) read on Wednesday at the usual haunt. The audience was far smaller than that for Sharon Olds. That, I suppose, is predictable, but it’s also a poor reflection on the knowledge of the poetry-reading public in Edinburgh. Gaelic
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There was a rare opportunity to hear American poet Sharon Olds read for the Poetry Association of Scotland on Wednseday night at the Scottish Poetry Library, so I took it. In the first half of the evening, she read mostly from her Selected Poems. After the interval, the usual PAS order was reversed, with questions
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No, I’ve not undergone a road-to-Pittodrie conversion to the Church of Two Halves; the season I’m talking about is the Shore Poets autumn programme, which got off to a superb start last night with Jackie Kay, Christine De Luca, Mandy Maxwell and music from the Linties. Mandy Maxwell is a graduate of the creative writing
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The inaugural Linlithgow Book Festival took place today. I managed to get along to three of the events: the opening talk, the poetry workshop and the closing reading. In the first event, Lithgae resident John Fowler talked on the subject of his book Mr Hill’s Big Picture, namely, David Octavius Hill and his huge painting
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Another Book Festival excursion yesterday evening. This time, it was to hear James Lasdun and Michael Symmons Roberts read from and discuss their second and first novels respectively. Typical Book Festival weather is either warm and sunny, with festival-goers spread over the lawn of Charlotte Square, or tipping it down. Last night was the latter.
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My first trip to this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival yesterday. I had tickets for three events, but could only make it to two of them. I couldn’t make it to the poetry translation workshop with George Szirtes, which was the event I had really wanted to attend, but I managed to pass my ticket
Amy Jo Philip 