Archive for category News

The latest online anthology from Lancaster Litfest’s Flax imprint features short fiction by five North West writers, and one of them is Whitehaven’s Emma Bragg (pictured).

Entitled This Road We’re On, this is the first Flax anthology with a connecting theme – relationships, specifically the pot-holed journey that is our search for companionship, love and acceptance. Read more …

From farting dogs to Victorian chimney sweeps, from war stories to westerns – Jim Eldridge has been a professional writer for nearly 40 years and a full-time writer since 1978. He has had 250 TV scripts broadcast in the UK and internationally, 250 Radio 4 scripts broadcast, and 65 books published which have sold over two million copies. He’s still going strong and 2010 has been a busy year – read more …

Crime writers, poets and celebrity authors came together last week to support the reopening of the New Bookshop that was devastated by floods in Cockermouth last year.

The shop has been trading from temporary premises for the last seven months. After extensive rebuilding, locals and visitors came out in force to support the reopening of the shop, which has been run by the same family for 40 years.

Read The Guardian article, including a specially written poem for the occasion by Jacob Polley, here …

See also the BBC video report from inside the shop just after the flood.

Helen Mort – who describes herself as “a reformed barmaid” on her blog – has just been appointed as the next Poet in Residence with the Wordsworth Trust.

Read more …

Throughout July, poet Simon Armitage is walking the Pennine Way and writing a book about it. More importantly, he’s doing the walk as a poet, in the style of the old troubadours. Wherever he stops for the night he’s going to give a poetry reading. There will be no charge for the reading, but at the end of the evening he’s passing a hat around, and people can give him what they think he’s worth. He wants to see if he can pay his way from start to finish on the proceeds of his poetry – in other words, 264 miles of begging.

Read more …

To celebrate 60 years of growing trees at altitude – 850 feet up in the Howgills – Weasdale Nurseries folk Andrew and Elaine Forsyth decided to hold a poetry competition on the theme of The Tree. Judges Andrew Forster, Josephine Dickinson, and Mick North met up over lunch in Weasdale’s idyllic oasis of trees to decide on the winners.

Read more …

Bowness on Solway’s second Writ On The Wall literature festival kicks off on 9 July, and includes a special event to celebrate the winners of the festival’s poetry competition. Find out who’s won and more about who’s on here …

Suddenly it’s all happening on the shores of the Solway. A writing weekend in Allonby (see our Events pages), a festival in Bowness (on Solway, not Windermere), and now novelist and scientist Ann Lingard’s doing guided walks in the footsteps of Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

Read more …