Bath Literature Festival, from 28th February to 8th March 2009
The full programme for the 2009 Bath Literature Festival, which will take place in the beautiful Georgian City from 28 February to 8 March, has now been revealed. Artistic Director, Sarah LeFanu, has based her programme on a number of strands running though the festival rather than a single theme. These strands include: The World Today; Darwin 2009; Retrospectives; The Cutting Edge; Intimate Lives; Undercover Writing and Wild Places. Booking opens on Monday 5th January with tickets priced from £3 to £17.
With some 130 events across nine days, this is truly a festival with something to offer everyone, across ages, backgrounds and interests. It is a festival which takes its audience on a journey of discovery and revelation, through discussion, debates, talks and workshops.
There are big names aplenty – Joan Bakewell; Terry Eagleton giving the keynote address on The Meaning of Life; Chris Patten; Wendy Cope and Alexander McCall Smith to name just a few – but this not a celebrity-fest or book-signing opportunity, its foundations go much deeper and spread more broadly than that. It’s based on a passion for the written word and a thirst for knowledge about and understanding of the world we inhabit.
Within the Writers of the World strand, Bath LitFest will be hosting authors from India, Angola, Argentina, Israel and Eritrea. And Emmanuel Jal, one of the thousands of child soldiers who fought in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, will be talking about those terrible years, how he eventually escaped and built a new life, and the humanitarian work he does now. There is a special focus on novelists, memoirists and poets from Hungary, too.
Central to this Festival, as ever, is the interaction between writers and readers. The Retrospectives strand goes beyond this and looks at the relationships between contemporary writers and those whose legacy they inherited. James Fenton, Tom Paulin and Lavinia Greenlaw will together reflect on those twentieth century poetic giants, W H Auden, T S Eliot and Ted Hughes.
In Undercover Writing, Misha Glenny will contemplate McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers, and take his audience on a terrifying journey through a new world of international organized crime, which now accounts for 20% of the world’s GDP.
There is again a Big Bath Read: this year Jonathan Coe’s poignant and exquisitely written The Rain Before It Falls.
Chris Patten will address some of the challenges facing our world, when he asks What Next? as part of The World Today; Ben Goldacre will reveal and de-bunk some of the dodgy science absorbed into popular culture in his event as part of The Cutting Edge strand.
Darwin 2009 celebrates the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work On the Origin of Species and the prize-winning poet Ruth Padel will talk about her great-great-Grandfather, Charles Darwin.
Poet and storyteller Hugh Lupton and musician Chris Wood will give the debut performance of a major new work specially commissioned by Bath Literature Festival in partnership with The Tollbooth in Stirling. The Homing Stone will recount the story of Arthur Ransome’s travels in Russia in the turbulent days of the revolution.
A range of events for families, schools and young people are presented as part of Bath Literature Festival – these include a Young Writers’ Competition and visiting authors programme for local primary schools. There are events for children and the family – featuring pop-ups and puppets, dinosaurs and dragons and singing poets – and even a Poetry Taxi to provide a unique and personal performance.
This is Sarah LeFanu’s final Bath Literature Festival as Artistic Director, after six hugely successful and much acclaimed years, and it is a programme to be proud of – adventurous, exhilarating and inspiring.
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