Karin Fernald
is a professional actor and speaker who specializes in characters from the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
She is a frequent guest speaker at The National Portrait Gallery and is a regular speaker for NADFAS. Her one-woman
show on Fanny Burney, The Famous Miss Burney, has travelled the world and has been greatly enjoyed from Canada to
Japan. Karin's new dramatized presentation, The Scandalous Mrs Piozzi, describes the later life of Dr Johnson's
great friend, writer and wit Hester Thrale-Piozzi. Hester was the friend of the Bluestockings' Elizabeth Montagu,
and the author of Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson LL.D as well as the editor of 367 of his letters in Letters
to and from the Late Samuel Johnson LL.D, which greatly annoyed Johnson's other biographer, James Boswell.
Her second marriage for love to the singer Gabriel Piozzi, her daughter's music master, shocked the fashionable world
and was savagely condemned by Johnson. The Scandalous Mrs Piozzi has been presented to the Johnson Society
of London and at Dr Johnson's house in Gough Square, and has been published in the New Rambler.
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| Photo by John Morrison |
Graeme Fife
is a polymathic Sevenoaks-based author and broadcaster whose early career was spent teaching classics in a boys' public
school. He has moved on to a varied life as a freelance writer on sport, travel, history and literature.
A recent Radio 3 essay series recalled his youthful meetings with the poet Robert Graves. He has also written radio
drama. One of his passions is cycling and he is the author of several books on the sport, including one
on the Tour de France. His interest in France was reflected in The Terror, a meticulously researched
history of the bloodsoaked climax of the French Revolution. He will be talking in Sevenoaks about his new novel
Charlotte Corday, Angel of the Assassination, which tells the story of the girl from Normandy who stabbed revolutionary
leader Jean-Paul Marat to death in his bath.
Patrick Gale's
best selling new novel The Whole Day Through has been chosen as BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime from August 10th-14th.
This bittersweet modern love story, published in June 2009, is his thirteenth novel. It tells the story of a man and
a woman who are reunited after an interval of two decades and have a brief taste of happiness. But both Laura and Ben
have commitments to care for relatives, a mother and a brother. The author's writing career begain in the
early 1980s when he eked out a hand-to-mouth existence with odd jobs after an English degree at Oxford. His first
two novels, The Aerodynamics of Pork and Ease, were published in 1986. His last work of fiction,
Notes from an Exhibition, was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club and voted by the Independent Booksellers'
Association as their favourite adult novel of 2008. We are happy to be able to bring Patrick Gale to Sevenoaks from
his home near Land's End to meet his widening circle of fans and close our 2009 Literary Celebration. There's
more about him on his excellent website.
The multi-talented Ian Kelly
has forged a double career as an actor and a writer since studying history at Cambridge. For the last two years
he has played the art professor William Lyon in Lee Hall's critically acclaimed play The Pitman Painters at the
National Theatre, a part in which he sketches live on stage, turning a blank sheet of paper into an accomplished sketch of
a miner. The production will transfer to Broadway in 2010. He is currently filming the last of the
Harry Potter films, in which he plays Hermione's father. His writing reflects his love of the
18th and early 19th centuries, and his interest in bringing to life characters who prefigure the modern age. Beginning
with a book about Antonin Careme the first ever celebrity chef, he moved on to the Regency dandy and arbiter of taste Beau
Brummell. His latest book, named Biography of the Year in the Sunday Times, tells the story of Giacomo Casanova,
the 18th century Venetian traveller and courtier, whose memoirs launched his historical reputation as the archetypal seducer.
Kelly's archival research, elegantly and wittily presented, reveals a rounded portrait of Casanova as a man whose
exploits reached well beyond the bedroom. His talk will reveal Casanova as a pioneering gourmet for whom food and sex
were never far apart. 'For men sex is like eating and eating is like sex; it is nourishment
...' To learn more about Ian Kelly, go to his website.
Christopher Lloyd
began his writing career covering science and innovation at the Sunday Times after a double first in History at Cambridge,
then moved into educational software and published his first book What on Earth Happened? in 2008. Writing
this narrative history of the world from the Big Bang to the present day led him to question the traditional pattern of history
teaching which puts human beings at the centre of everything. For him this is a mistaken notion which reinforces
the notion of human supremacy and underpins exploitation of the Earth's natural resources. In Sevenoaks he will
be presenting his new book What On Earth Evolved? which takes the highly original view of the place of the human
species in the history of evolution. In the 150th anniversary year of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species,
Christopher Lloyd zeroes in on 100 species that changed the world, from the virus to the honeybee to the tulip. A short
video taster can be seen on his publisher's website
Shena Mackay's
literary career began in the 1960s when she was barely 20, but her mastery of the novel and the short story has won her an
ever-increasing circle of admirers. Her stories deal with ordinary suburban lives but have a wicked vein of black
comedy and an impeccable prose style in which not a word is out of place. Connoisseurs of her work point to her
Booker-shortlisted novel The Orchard on Fire (1995) about a child growing up in the fictional Kent village of Stonebridge.
'I lived in Shoreham during the 1950s and went to school in Sevenoaks and Tonbridge. The countryside and the people
I knew then have stayed with me ever since,' she says. Her visit to Sevenoaks to talk about her childhood
memories will give readers a unique insight into how a novelist at the top of her form shapes her material into fiction.
Her most recent books are Heligoland (2003) and The Atmospheric Railway (2008), a collection of short stories.
She has won praise from critics for the balance she strikes between satire and unsentimental emotion. Ian Hamilton
described her in the Guardian as a writer who shuns self-promotion. 'In some ways, all of her novels and
short stories, whatever their actual settings, can seem like attempts to reclaim the sharply circumscribed intensities of
village life.'
Hilary Mantel's
latest novel Wolf Hall weighed in earlier this year at 650 pages, but left critics panting for more. 'I
read it almost non-stop. When I did have to put it down, I was full of regret the story was over, a regret I still feel,'
wrote historical novelist Vanora Bennett in the Times. 'This is a wonderful and intelligently imagined
retelling of a familiar tale from an unfamiliar angle.' This is a book about early Tudor history - that's
the familiar part - which features Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn among its characters. But its principal protagonist is
Thomas Cromwell, the enigmatic bureaucrat who rose from humble beginnings as the son of a blacksmith to be 'minister for
everything' at the heart of power in the Tudor court by helping to engineer Henry's annulment and his marriage to
Ann. We see the whole panorama of early 16th century England, with a large cast of men and women and families
on the make. The characterisation of such figures as Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More is unforgettable and the
skill with which Mantel describes what Cromwell observes and feels shows a novelist at the height of her powers.
This book burst the boundaries of the standard historical novel, an achievement that will come as no surprise to fans
familiar with the wide range of Hilary Mantel's other novels, including Beyond Black and A Place of Greater
Safety. There is a dark side to Wolf Hall, a story in which death is ever present. Cromwell
leaves his house one day and by the time he returns his wife has died of sweating sickness. There are brilliant set-piece
descriptions such as a scene where a woman is burned at the stake, and an ever-vivid use of the present tense as the story
unfolds through Cromwell's eyes. The title Hilary Mantel has chosen for her talk I Met a Man Who Wasn't
There reflects the curiously enigmatic character of Cromwell, a man who took his secrets to the grave.
Andrew Motion
stepped down this year after a decade as the nation's Poet Laureate, saying he was pleased to have done the job but equally
pleased to be handing over to Carol Ann Duffy. Faced with lots of second-guessing from journalists about what
poems he should be offering up to the nation, he hit a creative block for a while but is now busy writing again.
'I'm pleased to have got back to a more contemplative life, ' he says. The Cinder Path, his
latest collection, will be the focus of his reading at the Ship Theatre, which is this year's keynote opening event.
His problems during his period as laureate didn't come from the Royal Family, with whom his relations were always cordial,
but with the concept of commissioned poetry written to order: 'One of the most difficult things I found about writing
commissioned poems is the expectation they brought with them to look directly at whatever the subject of the commission was
- full in the face, as it were. My instinct as a poet has always been to tell the truth but to tell it slant,
to go round the side in the belief that while journalism and history and other kinds of discourse have a responsibility to
tell the evident truth as they see it, poetry's truth is more oblique and often more to do with suggestion and taking
the long view rather than the short term account.' Now in his fifties, Motion says a lot of his work
has been dominated by war and the idea of mortality. This is partly a reflection of the death of his much-loved
father, about whose last moments he has written. Although his previous collection was entitled Public Property,
he's a poet whose best work is quietly lyrical in the tradition of Wordsworth, Housman or Edward Thomas, about whom he
wrote a critical study. Andrew Motion's big achievement as Poet Laureate was to raise the profile of poety
by helping to set up the Poetry Archive website, which provides instant access to recordings of poets reading their own work.
David Nokes
is Professor of English Literature at King's College London working on 18th century literature. He has written acclaimed
biographies of Jonathan Swift (which won the James Tait Black Prize in 1985), John Gay and Jane Austen, and adapted Samuel
Richardson's Clarissa for BBC TV. His new biography of Samuel Johnson in the year of his tercentenary
is the first to be written for four decades His talk explores the relationship between Johnson and his wife Tetty,
which has been the subject of much biographical puzzlement. Examining the marriage anew, he presents it as having
been entered into, on Johnson's part, for purely practical reasons. Elizabeth Porter was 23 years older than
Johnson when they married, and a widow with considerable means. Professor Nokes examines the one letter that is our
only factual evidence for the the relationship and offers his thoughts on Johnson's feelings. He will end by reading
a brief extract from his new Faber biography, Samuel Johnson. Copies will be available for signing.
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| Photo by Martin Pope |
John Julius Norwich,
our guest at this year's Literary Lunch, is a brilliant historian, broadcaster and lecturer who has been closely associated
with the long struggle to preserve Venice. His many erudite and stylish books include acclaimed histories of Venice
& Byzantium, The Normans in the South about the Norman kingdom of Sicily in the Middle Ages, and The Middle
Sea: A History of the Mediterranean. Many readers will also be familiar with his amusing collections
of Christmas Crackers. We are very privileged to welcome him to our lunch at St Julian's Club, just east
of Sevenoaks, to talk about his life and times. Trying to Please, his recent autobiography, tells the
story of his upbringing as the son of extraordinary parents, the famous diplomatic couple Duff and Lady Diana Cooper.
He met everyone from General de Gaulle to H.G. Wells in his youth, and he writes about them all in a book that has been described
as the opposite of a misery memoir.
(Numbers are limited at this event and tickets for past literary lunches have
sold out fast, so please book early to avoid disappointment. Please note this year the talk precedes the lunch
and will begin promptly at 12 noon.)
The Best of John Betjeman, a reading performed by actor Lance Pierson, brings to life one of the last century's best-loved poets. Beyond
his poetry, Betjeman was a television personality, a conservationist and an author who was always passionate about his interests
in life - railways, the opposite sex, the countryside and the past. The poet, immortalised with his own statue
at the reopened St Pancras International station, was always self-deprecating and deeply honest about himself.
Lance Pierson has performed his Betjeman reading to enthusiastic audiences as part of the Edinburgh fringe.
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| Photo by Steve Cockayne |
At our Past Crimes event two highly regarded authors
of crime fiction will talk abut the growing trend for authors to set their mysteries in the past, from the Middle Ages to
the twentieth century. They discuss the advantages - the freedom from recognised police procedure and the absence
of mobile phones - and the pitfalls of the genre. How do the most successful authors use historical research without
getting carried away with it, and how do they combine a love of history with the traditional whodunnit in a way that will
appeal to modern readers? Andrew Taylor
was chosen by his fellow crime writers as the winner of the 2009 Cartier Diamond Dagger award. He is the author of Bleeding
Heart Square, set in 1930s London, and of The American Boy, selected by the Richard & Judy Book Club, about
Edgar Allan Poe.
Laura Wilson reviews crime fiction for the Guardian and is this year's chair of the programming
committee of the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. Among her seven published novels are Stratton's War
and An Empty Death, part of a series set in London in World War II.
After last year's successful event for secondary school pupils, the 2009
Literary Celebration is giving hundreds of Sevenoaks primary school children the chance to meet one of their favourite authors.
Ian Whybrow spent most of his life as a secondary school teacher
before turning to writing with the first of The Sniff Stories in 1989, which received rave reviews. One
of a very small number of children's authors to have topped the bestseller lists, Ian has written over 100 books and is
published in 27 languages in 28 countries. He is among the top ten most read children's writers in the UK
and ranks fifteenth among all writers. His work includes Quacky Quack Quack!, Little Farmer Joe, the
award-winning Little Wolf's Book of Badness and the famous Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs series,
as well as popular books for slightly older children. His inventive and original humour and his fine ear for how
children speak and behave give his stories a special quality when he reads them aloud. 'I loved being read
to as a child,' he says. 'I loved the sense that my mother and father were enjoying themselves too.
For me, that's the acid test for any good book - that there's something in it for everyone to enjoy.'
This year the best part of a milion copies of Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs Go to School will be distributed
free to children starting school across the UK through the Booktime programme.
Anyone seeking an antidote to the crinolines-and-bonnets view of Victorian
London will find it in the latest book by Sarah Wise, The
Darkest Streets. This tells the story of The Nichol, a notorious slum district in 1880s Bethnal Green, where
ineffective local government, shoddy buildings and slum landlords combined to create devastating poverty. This
book is a meticulous piece of social history based on archival research which has much to tell us about the relationship between
poverty, crime, charity and government that is relevant to life today. Sarah Wise's first book was The
Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize
for Non-Fiction and won the Crime Writers' Association 2005 Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction. This book describes
a famous murder case from the era of Burke & Hare when the demand from medical students for fresh corpses for dissection
led to frequent cases of grave robbing.
