It's not often that a literature event inspires in us such a sense of urgency that we feel duty-bound to log on and make something of a public service announcement, like: Run, dear readers, run like the wind - get your tickets now! We're a leisurely lot, us bookish types, will get around to buying our event tickets when we get around to it, and rarely need to spend a morning refreshing our computer screens for a chance at a coveted front-row seat at a Rushdie reading in the hopes that Rushdie might toss us his towel.
But. So far as rockstars of the London literature world go, the Hay Festival has put together a pretty stellar little programme of events which it will bring to Kings Place for a 3-day stint from the 23rd to 25th of October. Londony highlights include Hanif Kureishi discussing The Buddha of Suburbia; a look at the writing of London in the works of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Martin Amis, Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith; a conversation with Will Self; and Amis himself, whose new novel The Pregnant Widow is due out next spring. Would-be competitors for the next Londonist trivia night could do worse for a brush-up on their literary factoids.
Now, it could be that we're just weirdly overstimulated by literary awards week (the Booker Prize today! the Forward Prize tomorrow! the Nobel in Literature Thursday!), but Hay-at-Kings-Place would seem to run a fairly good chance of selling out. So: Run, dear readers, run like the wind - get your tickets now!
Image courtesy of Krypto under the Creative Commons licence
