Hang on to your TLSs. Literary London is a lioness roaring in a few weeks ahead of her regularly scheduled appearance in March. With both the London Word Festival and Jewish Book Week launching this week, we’ve got enough events in our diary to keep us busy until spring. Keep an eye on this space as we highlight our favourites from these festivals over the next couple of weeks.
Monday: You want poetry? RADA’s got poetry. Novels? Check. Short stories? Screenplays? Done and done. RADA’s writLOUD covers it all, featuring writers from Birkbeck’s creative writing programme as well as a mysterious “well-known” author (if it turns out to be JK Rowling, you heard it here first). And it’s free. 6.30pm. If, on the other hand, you’re a poetry purist and don’t like to see any other genres in the mix, head to the Troubadour for a reading from the Oxford Poets. 8pm, £6 tickets, £5 concessions.
Tuesday: Literati mingling with scientists? Eek! Oh, alright, if novelist AS Byatt and scientist Steven Rose can get over it, so can we. You can hear these two discussing the interplay of memory and writing tonight at the Southbank Centre (7.45pm, £10 tickets, £5 concessions). Or you can go Wild with Jay Griffiths at the Royal Geographical Society (7pm, £15 tickets, £10 concessions/members), or pop into Housmans for the launch of The Whistler by Angolan author Ondjaki (7pm).
Wednesday: Excuse the aside, but do you know what '80s song we really can’t help but sing along with? Tainted Love. So naturally we wanted to know more about Stewart Home’s novel of the same name. Home’s latest, which he will be reading and discussing at North Kensington Library tonight, follows his narrator from flower power to the fast-living drug-fuelled '70s. Sounds like a trip. Much like the Soft Cell video. Free, 6pm.
Thursday: File this one under “Wow, that’s some title”: Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media. Gee, we wonder what it’s about. Solve the mystery by stopping in at the London Review Bookshop for author Nick Davies’ talk. 7pm, £6.
Friday: We may be cheating here a bit. We’re not sure that the School for Gifted Children’s appearance at Bardens Boudoir really qualifies as a literary event. But it’s literary-ish. And as part of what the London Word Festival aims to do is celebrate the shared medium of language as used by artists of otherwise very different genres, we think we’re keeping to the spirit of the event. Plus, we just like this crew. 7pm, £7.
Saturday: (Take a breather. Alphabetise all those lovely new books you’ve bought at this week’s events. Listen to Tainted Love on continuous replay.)
Sunday: And Jewish Book Week has hit the ground running. Among the events that most interest us today are National Space/Private Home: Cultural Shifts in Israeli Literature (2pm, £8), The Lost: A Search for Six out of Six Million (5pm, £8), The Clothes on Their Backs (6.30pm, £8), and Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present (8.30pm, £12).
We wish you much stamina and many enjoyable reads.
Image courtesy of DB007’s flickrstream via the Londonist Flickr pool
