The fourth Brook Green Book Festival, which aims to bring together West London writers and local people, takes place from Monday October 17 at Holy Trinity Parish Centre.

The first event, featuring Edward Fox reciting T S Elliott's Four Quartets has already sold out. However tickets, priced £4 each are still available for the other talks, each beginning at 8pm.

Here is the schedule:

Tuesday October 18
WILLIAM FIENNES on 'Teenagers, their words and their worlds'

There is widespread anxiety in Britain about the literacy and articulacy of young people. William Fiennes tells us how to motivate and empower them by giving them the skills to write about their own worlds.

WILLIAM FIENNES's first book, The Snow Geese, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize for literature. His second book, The Music Room (2009), was called 'a small masterpiece' (Sunday Telegraph). He is Director and co-founder of the charity First Story, which supports creativity and literacy in challenging secondary schools.

Wednesday October 19
ANNA REID presents an illustrated talk on the siege of Leningrad, drawing on her new book Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege 1941- 1944 (Bloomsbury).

Seventy years ago this summer Hitler launched Barbarossa, his surprise attack on the Soviet Union. Leningrad became the first city not to fall to his armies as they swept east. The German generals decided to starve it out. By the time the siege was lifted over two years later, between a quarter and a third of the city's civilian population had starved to death. Reid strips away Soviet myth to tell the story of an overlooked atrocity.

ANNA REID is a former Kiev correspondent for the Economist and helped to set up the centre-right think-tank Policy Exchange. Her first book, Borderland: A Journey through the History of the Ukraine, was described in the Financial Times as 'A beautifully written evocation of Ukraine's brutal past and its shaky efforts to construct a better future.

Thursday October 20:
SHIREEN JILLA and KARIN ALTENBERG: From Manhattan to the Hebrides
Two local authors take us to very different landscapes with their first novels. In Exiled (Quartet Books) Shireen Jilla depicts a British woman adjusting to life in hedonistic Manhattan. Here she is suddenly plunged into a terrifying crisis where she feels powerless to defend her family. In Island of Wings (Quercus) Karin Altenberg takes us to St Kilda, one of the remotest Scottish islands. A new Church of Scotland minister and his wife find this bleak community challenging everything they had taken for granted.

SHIREEN JILLA is a journalist who has written regularly for the Evening Standard and the Sunday Times. KARIN ALTENBERG comes from southern Sweden and moved to Britain to study in 1996. She holds a PhD in Archaeology. Each reads a short extract from her work before discussing it with Oliver Marre, former Deputy Literary Editor of the Observer.

Friday Octobe 21:
JEREMY LEWIS on 'Shades of Greene'

Graham Greene is by far the best known of his extended family. But in Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family (Jonathan Cape, hb; Vintage pb) Jeremy Lewis gives us the full context of the Greene family life, with all its eccentricities and achievements. In addition to Graham Greene the family included an MI6 agent, a Nazi-sympathizing idealist, a physician who tried to climb Mt Everest, a Director General of the BBC, and a feckless alcoholic who once wrote to the Soviet Embassy offering to spy for them. Ian Thomson in the Guardian said that 'Shades of Greene, with its passages of vinegary humour and trenchant insight, provides a wonderfully compelling record of the author [Graham Greene] and his extended clan.'

JEREMY LEWIS worked as a publisher for many years, and was deputy editor of the London Magazine 1990 - 1994. He has written three volumes of autobiography, and biographies of Cyril Connolly and Allen Lane

Daunt Books from Holland Park will make available a selection of books by the featured authors each evening. The authords will be happy to sign their books.

Proceeds from the Festival will be divided equally between the Shannon Trust and the Holy Trinity Building Fund. The Shannon Trust promotes literacy in prisons through self-help schemes. The Holy Trinity Building Fund helps to meet the cost of the refurbishment of the Parish Centre as a meeting place for the community.

 

 

 

October 14, 2011