Berwick Literary Festival Blog
Written, spoken, performed
That’s it folks. Four days. Twenty Events. Record attendance from 34 different countries.
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The Final Day: Bread-making, beating the IRA, Geordies buying a slave’s freedom and revisiting the 60s!
Timing is everything! There was a period early in lockdown when it seemed everybody was baking sourdough. Nobody knew that there was going to be a pandemic, however if some…
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Stephen Green: rethinking what we think we know
If you were concocting a fantasy dinner party guest list, you’d want a good mix of people to keep the conversation flowing. A government minister, maybe. The CEO of a global bank for a view of how the world works, and a clergyman for a rather different perspective. Throw in a linguist who’s lived in the US, Asia and Saudi Arabia, a civil servant, an author, a chap who visited 56 countries in three years boosting UK trade, and… oh hell, we’re out of cutlery.
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ADVENTURES IN LETTERS – THE EPISTOLARY POEM
Tim Binder writes about Anne Ryland’s poetry workshop Twelve of us “gathered” on Zoom for Anne Ryland’s delightful workshop on writing an Epistolary poem – or writing a letter in…
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On the third day of our festival: China the restless superpower, a world-class Berwick novelist, digging for victory, saving the planet and why Boris Johnson is unique.
Can this really only be the third day of our festival? We seem to have managed to pack such an extraordinarily diverse range of stimulating and entertaining material into such…
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Saturday: Festival quotes
If you heard Jessie Greengrass speak at today’s Festival, I’m guessing that you, like me, will be rushing to order her new book The High House. This deep-thinking, candid-speaking interview…
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Friday: Festival quotes
Shaun Bythell joined us from his bookshop – The Bookshop – in Wigtown. Following his first two books about shop life (The diary of a bookseller and Confessions of a…
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A not so grumpy bookseller, a Wild Swimmer, a Royal Crisis, incredible Poetry and revolution in Russia – the second day of our virtual festival.
In his entertaining best-selling books Shaun Bythell portrays himself as the grumpiest bookseller in Britain, providing service with a scowl, but he seemed perfectly amiable at 10 AM this morning in…
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Writing about the Past! A Creative Workshop with Bea Davenport
Anna Edgar writes about Bea’s workshop. On Thursday afternoon Barbara Henderson – using her author’s name, Bea Davenport – presented an online creative writing workshop, “Writing about the Past”. In…
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The First Day – Biography, History, Poetry and Maths
Ann Thwaite is one of Britain’s greatest biographers, so it was a privilege to hear her discuss her extraordinary literary life at our festival. She is however not only the…
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