Cheltenham Festivals news archives

9 months
2 weeks ago

Two questions that are of huge interest to me have been springing up persistently this week: 1) How important is it for a writer of literary non-fiction to respect facts? and 2) How important is it for a fiction writer to invent things from scratch?

Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kenyan writer who lives in the US. He is currently working on a memoir about growing up in the African country and has come to share the stage at Cheltenham Festival with Colum McCann. Wainaina has electric energy, evident as much in his shiny blue shoes as in the way he cracks a joke and sticks his tongue out. He reads from a bunch of A4 pages stapled together, and before he starts he announces that the book has no title yet, so if we have any ideas we should let him know. The writing is playful, brilliant, messing around with sound — ‘Prrroud!’, he exclaims, ‘Prrrrim!’ he shouts, and he smacks his lips with imaginary rouge when he describes his older sister and cousins putting on their mothers’ make-up. His childhood impressions are explosions of sensation, texture and colour. The audience is delighted, people giggle, they’re on a journey. I sit there, listening to it and wishing the book was finished, that I could go out and buy it immediately.

When he’s finished, the chair asks Wainaina why he decided to write a memoir. ‘It took me a few months for the word ‘memoir’ to pass my lips comfortably,’ he says. Wainaina confesses that he struggled with the categorisation, and that he’d thought of classing it as fiction at first, but that he’d finally decided that a memoir might work best since it is a real place, real people and real time he’s writing about. ‘It’s just that,’ he says, ‘as a writer, I have zero respect for facts.’ The chair, and some audience members, are surprised, even slightly shocked by this. How, they ask, can you write a memoir without adhering to fact? Wainaina sticks his tongue out and wriggles in his chair, smiling. He explains that memories are difficult. He can’t exactly remember what colour the sky was on a certain day or whether the girl of his dreams walked into his room on Independence Day or on a completely different day. ‘The things I write about happened in my life, and I write about them in the way I feel is emotionally true. Whether the actual fact of a place or time is accurate or not is of no real concern to me. It doesn’t add or detract from the truth of the story.’ I sit and listen and applaud Wainaina’s honesty and I go up to him at the end of the talk to say how much I agree. And to find out when the memoir is out. Not until next year, he says.

A memoir is not always a factual account of a historical event or people or a place — though it is often that; it’s also a reflection of the writer’s memories of a time in his or her life, and most importantly, the impressions of that time. Often our memory cheats us, makes us think something happened when and where it actually didn’t. But it’s those flawed memories that may hide our true impressions of a time, it’s from those firmly un-factual memories that we can learn what we may have thought about someone or something. On the other hand, one can simply (and brazenly) choose to invent new surroundings for certain events, those that might have perhaps fitted the situation better. After all it’s the role of the writer to invent, and as long as one is not printing a libellous or nasty untruth, how much does it matter in the end?

Geoff Dyer’s new novel, a diptych entitled Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, plays with the same notion, only the other way round. Dyer admits to all of his fiction being heavily influenced by autobiographical material. ‘I can’t invent stories,’ he says. ‘Everything I write is observationally derived. I like the embellishment and elaboration of reality.’ Dyer seems to have dedicated his life to the genre-confusion of the reader, and he likes it. ‘So are you comfortable calling your latest a novel?’ the chair asks. Dyer looks at him mischievously. ‘Yes. I think it’s very novel. And highly unusual.’ He adds that in challenging categorisation, he is waging a war against cliché not just as a linguistic tiredness, but against the cliché of concept. An audience member asks whether he can afford not to care because he’s so well known and he knows he’ll get published whatever he writes. The mischievous look appears again. ‘The thing of writing what is expected of you always comes down to a desire for commercial success. I don’t care much about sales or what the publishing world wants. The most important thing is to write what you want, not what anyone else thinks you should write. That’s what freedom is all about.’

There are still rebels among us. And to my delight, I found two in one week.

Vesna Maric is one of our three writers in residence at this year’s festival. Catch up with Vesna Maric, Kapka Kassabova and Sathnam Sanghera in event 282 on Sunday 18 October.

Vesna’s latest book is Bluebird published by Granta Books.

We’ve tagged this post with literature, review, writers in residence on Thursday 15 October 2009.

9 months
2 weeks ago

Looking at the Stars

I’ve been staring at the cover of Paddy Ashdown’s autobiography and I can’t get past the title: A Fortunate Life. I unreservedly admire the man, but I wonder why a writer would use such a title, unless he was either being ironic or has had an irony by-pass. To find out, I’ll have to literally get past the title.

But in the shorter term, here’s a longer question. Pin-up girls and other ‘celebs’ publish books these days, and if it’s not about quality writing, it must be about character. Who makes a good character? Because it’s character — real or fictitious — that makes a story worth reading. A few events today promised a few answers.

First, I travelled to Shanghai of the early 1900s in the company of sinologist Robert Bickers. His book’s title Empire Made Me quotes from a document written in the early 1900s. It’s a personal-sounding statement, and this is indeed the personal story of an English nobody called Richard Maurice Tinkler who ‘died as he lived — violently’. Feel free to forget the name instantly, because the point is not in the name. It’s in the life and what it illuminates. Quite a lot: the story of Shanghai as it became Asia’s super-city; the lives of British ex-pats caught up in it — the expression ‘Shanghaied’ meant kidnapped or trapped; in short, the momentum of 20th century history.

‘I’m of that growing strand of historians who like telling stories’ — Bickers said — ‘stories of ordinary people and the complexity of their situations. Tinkler’s life tells us something about empire. And about failure. As a historian I’m very interested in failure. We’re often blinded by success stories, discourses full of confidence, control and rule. But failure is as much a part of life as success, if not more so.’

I salute this breed of intimate history. Through one character, it brings to life monumental cities and eras. It’s a healthy antidote to celebrity publishing which brings to life monumental egos while imitating intimacy.

I was startled out of my reverie by two ‘butlers in the buff’ at the entrance to the ‘Literary Heroes’ event. It started with the fluffy question: ‘Who was your first crush?’ and ended with the fluffy announcement of the nation’s favourite romantic hero (Mr Rochester). But in between, sharp questions were asked and interesting things were said about good romantic heroes and what makes us remember them. Heathcliff might be a ‘manic-depressive nutter’ in Sharon Kendrick‘s words, but he is unforgettably conflicted. My highlight was Stella Duffy’s answer to: should the perfect hero get everything they want?

‘No,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, story wouldn’t exist. Story with a capital ‘s’ exists for us to explain ourselves. All story is quest. It doesn’t have to be through love. It can be something else we don’t have.’

At the end of the day, my quest took me to a story about an immortal hero. Not immortal in a Dorian Gray way, but in reverse. It’s the story of his creator who died young but his writing never ages. Fortune and misfortune, success and failure, agony and ecstasy — it’s all there, in the one-man play by Leslie Clack More lives than one. Oscar Wilde might have found himself in the gutter towards the end, but never stopped looking at the stars. He was one of them. The real stars, that is.

Kapka Kassabova is one of our three writers in residence at this year’s festival. Catch up with Kapka Kassabova, Vesna Maric and Sathnam Sanghera in event 282 on Sunday 18 October.

Kapka’s latest book is Street Without a Name published by Portobello Books.

We’ve tagged this post with literature, review, writers in residence on Wednesday 14 October 2009.

9 months
2 weeks ago

I like Alastair Campbell. I know many people don’t, holding him responsible, among other things, for the moronification of British political discourse, but I think he’s charismatic and interesting, I admire the work he does raising money for cancer charities and his openness about his depression, and his work ethic is impressive.

Still, this is Cheltenham, not the most Labour of towns, and 2009, when New Labour is about as fashionable as Michael Bolton, and the main reason I went to see him speak in the Town Hall was to see if he’d get pelted with eggs. He wasn’t. But the questions from the audience suggested a healthy level of scepticism: ‘Did you get addicted to life in power?’; ‘Do you recognise yourself as spin doctor?’; ‘Does “call me dave” Cameron have better spin doctors than Gordon Brown?’; ‘Did you undermine the Civil Service in your time as Tony Blair’s spokesman?’; ‘Has the media succumb to Cameron’s media hype?’. And, of course the obligatory question about how Campbell felt about Burnley, his beloved football team, being promoted.

His responses to these questions were, respectively: ‘No, I was never seduced by the trappings of power’; ‘no’; ‘David Cameron says he is Tony Blair’s successor, but the truth is that he is my successor: he’s all about image and positioning, whereas Tony Blair was good at decision-making and strategy and political change in a way he isn’t’; ‘no’; ‘yes, nick Robinson, the other day referred to Cameron as PM — there hasn’t even been an election yet’; and ‘delighted’.

When it came to being interviewed by broadcaster Kirsty Lang, the two themes Campbell concentrated on were mental illness and novel-writing. On the former he was, as ever, frank and brave, admitting to suffering from a major physical and mental collapse after leaving Downing Street. ‘I noticed the gaps between the depressions were getting shorter and for the first time I saw a psychoanalyst for a sustained time. I now realise the depressions are as much a part of me as hairs on my leg, and when I was transcribing my Downing Street diaries I was surprised by how many of my moods could have been depressive without me or those around me realising it.’

On the theme of writing, however, he was annoying, if only because he seems to find it easy and enjoyable, and I wish I did. ‘The idea for the first novel, All in the Mind, just came to me,’ he said, adding that he didn’t tell anyone he writing it until he’d done a draft and confessing he was afflicted by a kind of ‘demonic energy’. ‘In all it took about seven months to finish. And of all the things I’ve done since Downing Street this has been the thing I’ve enjoyed most. I guess it’s because as a novelist you can control everything!’

Needless to say, the second novel is finished. ‘It’s about a female filmstar and her relationship with a boy she went to school with.’ A pause. ‘It’s about how lives change as a result of fame, the trauma of fame.’ Based on someone he knows? ‘Well, all I can say is that she’s British, and she has dark hair. And I’m very proud of the fact that I sort of designed the cover. It’s a hazy picture of a very beautiful person.’

He may have given up spin doctoring, but it seems Campbell still can’t resist dabbling in a bit of image-making.

Sathnam Sanghera is one of our three writers in residence at this year’s festival. Catch up with Sathnam Sanghera, Kapka Kassabova and Vesna Maric in event 282 on Sunday 18 October.

Sathnam’s latest book is The Boy with the Topknot published by Penguin.

We’ve tagged this post with literature, review, writers in residence on Tuesday 13 October 2009.

9 months
2 weeks ago

‘The blank piece of paper is unimpressed. It hasn’t read your previous work.’ John Irving sits on the stage resembling Dennis Hopper with his cool demeanour, blue jeans and white hair combed back. He looks down at his hands and frequently peppers his musings on the writing life with dry wit. ‘I’m interested in the inevitable bad outcome of a story,’ he says. ‘I like the Oedipus myth, for example. When Oedipus kills his father and sleeps with his mother, you know that’s not going to end well.’ His talk is, to writers and writing-enthusiasts alike, a lesson in what a life in writing is — or can be. Irving’s method consists of such hard discipline and persistence and knuckling down, however, that it makes the Japanese Zen Buddhists’ daily routine (meditating in a single position for anything up to twenty hours a day; all pain endured) like an all-day breakfast in bed.

Irving writes ten to twelve hours a day, every day, seven days a week. Not only that, he believes that this is the only way to be a truly excellent writer — or that a truly excellent writer can do nothing but write all day. Also that he or she must always know his manuscript inside out. Every mention of every small detail needs to be accounted for in the writer’s head, page number and all, at any point of the writing process. And this is achieved, says Irving, by constant, painstaking rereading and rewriting. Fifty, sixty times at least, of every manuscript you ever write. As I listen, I feel inadequate, ashamed. I am so lazy, I think. I can only muster four to five hours at the computer, five days a week. And then I’m wiped, nothing good comes out. I do reread and rewrite a lot, though, so that may offer some salvation. But I remind myself of how very different the writing process can be from one writer to another — Hemingway famously wrote standing up, and only in the morning, while others, like Balzac, only worked at night.

‘Were you born disciplined? Or did you learn to be disciplined?’ asks an awe-struck audience member. Irving pauses, as he does before each answer, takes a breath, fiddles with his arthritic fingers, a charming Zen master of sentence structure. You can hear him rereading and rewriting his answer in his head before he speaks. At one time in his life, he says, he taught writing and wrestling (not simultaneously), and the discipline of sport, the monotonous drill of training for hours on end, learning his skill and paying attention to detail, is what helped him set up his writing discipline. He talks about having a problem with anger as a young man. ‘Real life was too chaotic for me. Too many ambiguities, unanswered questions,’ he says. It made him angry. Real life, he goes on, simply fell short of the meaningful, purposeful structures of novels he’d loved reading, writers like Dickens and Melville where everything happened for a reason, and every cause had its consequence. He hated the chaos, the lack of a clear direction he found in ordinary, every day life. So writing, and the discipline that went with it, gave him meaning, a purpose. But I like the chaos of life, I realise as Irving talks, and I like the ambiguities, the unanswered questions. It’s chaos that everything was created from and it is the purpose of (good) literature to decode and underline the inconsistencies of human beings and the world, and perhaps with a bit of humour, to offer some salvation.

Irving’s talk is fascinating. He’s an old-school writer, a man who takes his task of creating fiction seriously. He hates first-person narratives, says he finds them limiting, and is at his happiest when creating intricate plots or researching the background material for his stories. On the day when Alastair Campbell, while promoting his first novel at the Festival, says it took him a single year to conceive, write and publish his book, Irving’s revelation that the idea for his latest novel (his 12th), Last Night in Twisted River, was brewing in his mind for twenty years, and took a ‘quick’ three years to write, gives me back faith in the writing process and the value of taking your time. True, writing is hard, slow work that can sometimes seem endless. But if you think plenty before you start, knuckle down and most importantly, enjoy it, it’s the best work in the world.

Vesna Maric is one of our three writers in residence at this year’s festival. Catch up with Vesna Maric, Kapka Kassabova and Sathnam Sanghera in event 282 on Sunday 18 October.

Vesna’s latest book is Bluebird published by Granta Books.

We’ve tagged this post with literature, review, writers in residence on Monday 12 October 2009.

9 months
3 weeks ago

A day of democracy and britishness

I’m in the autumn-glorious festival tent village where a whole nation of readers and their kids have come to browse books and sip cappuccinos. The only visual flaw, as you enter the Imperial Gardens crab-like from the side, is a photo of Robert Mugabe on a black Times banner. Of course The Times are the festival’s sponsor, and there are more newsy images on other Times banners, but a blown-up dictatorial visage staring at the middle distance is a bit of an odd choice.

Which takes us straight to our Saturday lunchtime event — a discussion on democracy with two political authors: professor John Keane and correspondent Humphrey Hawksley. Keane is the author of the impressive-sounding The Life and Death of Democracy, and Hawksley of the alarming-sounding Democracy Kills. He confessed to choosing the title for entirely commercial reasons. But they are only partly commercial. The other part turned out to be ideological, always a bad sign in journalism. Before he talked — without explaining anything — about the lethal nature of democracy as seen in Iraq and other failed states, Hawksley made a necessary concession to basic human rights, as seen in democratic states. Let’s not forget, he said, that ‘it’s nice to sit here and not have our heads cut off at the end of the talk.’ Then he went on to forget, with sweeping statements like ‘Democracy is not working: Africa is getting poorer. Democracy as we know it — with free and fair elections — kills. We have to think of something else.’

Keane — who looks like Bono and speaks like Churchill — was already thinking of something else. He warned us against a current zeitgeist of excessive disillusionment with democracy, and urged us to distinguish the real thing from its misuse, as in Berlusconi’s Italy. ‘The word democracy is in a hairy state of abuse,’ he said, an apt way to describe Berlusconi’s tortured hairstyle. He talked grippingly about hubris and how democracy is the only way to prevent it from fully expressing itself for an indefinite amount of time. Hawksley retaliated by inviting the audience to imagine that an apocalypse has befallen Britain. You have two choices, he said. A dictatorship (Cuba), or a nominal democracy (Haiti). I had no idea that Haiti — one of the poorest and most violent places on earth — was a democracy, which says something about the above-mentioned misuse of the word. Anyway, hands went up for Cuba, but that’s a predictable old chestnut among those unreconstructed Western idealists who haven’t actually lived in Cuba. Keane keenly observed that if we have a problem with liberal democracy, there is always Venezuela or Burma. Indeed, in countries where people are bludgeoned to death with dogma, at least we can’t blame democracy for the killing.

I followed Democracy with Britishness, briefly pausing to admire Cherie Blair who was Speaking for Herself and looking sharp in a navy suit.

Being British was the subject of former Sunday Telegraph and Spectator editor Matthew D’Ancona’s talk about a new collection of essays on Britishness. The idea was originally Gordon Brown’s, but as ‘he’s been a bit busy’, D’Ancona did the commissioning. The introduction is by Brown himself, but D‘Ancona stressed that his own sense of Britishness is not necessarily the same — it isn‘t all about ‘being nice and brushing your teeth twice a day, it isn‘t necessarily about “values”.’ It’s more about attitudes and if one attitude emerged from the essays as being British, it’s the desire to cohabit peacefully. D’Ancona was insightful, amusing, thought-provoking, and all-round great company as he gave us the highlights on Britishness as seen by his authors: ‘an amicable blur’; ‘diversity, porousness, heterogeneity’; ‘a rising tide of pebbles’ compared with the rock-solid, monolithic establishments of yesterday. The consensus is that there is no final consensus on Britishness — and that’s a healthy thing. Because with consensus comes stasis. And with stasis come dogma, abuse and hubris. And then we’re back with Mugabe and Berlusconi.

In other words, I was ready for a tea break at The Times Café featuring a performance of a chapter from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. How very British of me.

Kapka Kassabova is one of our three writers in residence at this year’s festival. Catch up with Kapka Kassabova, Vesna Maric and Sathnam Sanghera in event 282 on Sunday 18 October.

Kapka’s latest book is Street Without a Name published by Portobello Books.

We’ve tagged this post with literature, review, writers in residence on Sunday 11 October 2009.

9 months
3 weeks ago

There have been mutterings and complaints, in literary circles, that too few of the figures featured in the marketing material for The 2009 Times Cheltenham Literary Festival are actual writers. Comedians, yes. Presenters of Top Gear who happen to have a book out. But not enough people who live and breathe words for a living.

And on my first night here, finding myself trying to decide between seeing Jo Brand or Richard Hammond, it seemed like they had a point. But it must be remembered that festivals are just a reflection of what is happening in publishing, and celebrity titles give publishers the cash to gamble on literary work. Also, for every James Cracknell and Ben Fogel speaking here yesterday there was a Hermione Lee or Hilary Mantel.

Though, having said that, when it came down to it, I chose to see Shappi Khorsandi, that great literary figure perhaps best known for being the Iranian woman who is sometimes quite funny on Have I Got News For You. And I say ‘sometimes quite funny’ because I’ve never liked her as much as I want to. She’s a fascinating figure but there’s something about her relentless need to make gags that makes her difficult to engage with. And, sure enough there were gags aplenty last night.

In the Town Hall to talk to an audience of about 700 about her book A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English, her account of adapting to London after fleeing from Tehran in the 1980s, she talked about confused identity (‘I always feel English until someone asks me if I feel English… and then I feel Swedish’), giving her son an Irish-Iranian name (‘I don’t know why they make you name your children when you’re so hormonal’), cultural misunderstandings at school (‘I thought there was a line in the Lord’s Prayer that went “Halloween be thy name”’), religion (‘I thought we didn’t eat pig because pigs were cute’), her father’s desire to be a performer (‘I wanted to be a doctor, but my father pushed me into comedy’) and Iran (‘In Iran we advocate free speech, but you’re no longer free after you’ve spoken’). It went down well, but I nodded when, at one point, the host asked her: ‘Is there anything you won’t make a joke of?’

Fortunately Khorsandi became more appealing as the event morphed from standup gig to literary reading. Initially she seemed embarrassed by her own writing (‘don’t ever write a book in first year of your child’s life’) but it subsequently transpired that she is dyslexic and finds reading-out difficult, and that her book is actually very good. We heard about her early impressions of England as a child (She initially wanted to call the book English People Smell of Milk), what it felt like translating news of the Revolution on Newsround to her mother as a six or seven year old, a beloved uncle being shot in the back in Iran as a 19 year old, an infant relative dying of measles. At one point she remarked, ‘I’m not very good at being serious out loud.’ But she’s wrong. She very good at it, and being so makes her comedy more powerful.

Sathnam Sanghera is one of our three writers in residence at this year’s festival. Catch up with Sathnam Sanghera, Kapka Kassabova and Vesna Maric in event 282 on Sunday 18 October.

Sathnam’s latest book is The Boy with the Topknot published by Penguin.

We’ve tagged this post with literature, review, writers in residence on Saturday 10 October 2009.