Tom Sykes, author of Coast of Teeth
I love literary festivals for their diversity – and I use that term in its most diverse sense. Many forms and genres are represented, and there’s huge variety amongst the attendees. Twenty years ago, I had an experience that was
unsettling then, but that now I think is symbolic of the wonderful, motley and surprising nature of festivals. At a showcase of new writers, I read a story about a crazed US president who wrecks relations with other nations to trigger nuclear armageddon because he believes he’ll be raptured into heaven. By the end of my reading, all faces were longer than Shergar’s… and the room as lively as Shergar is today. I received no applause. The reader after me was a chirpy woman in a green quilted coat. ‘It’s National Bird Day today!’ she beamed. ‘And I’d like to read you a poem about a gorgeous kingfisher who keeps visiting my garden.’ She got applause. Her poem couldn’t have been more different to my story. At the time, as an insecure newbie writer, I resented her stuff being liked and not mine. But now I see the funny side of the contrast and appreciate that this eclectic event may have exposed an attendee to something new and unexpected. Literary festivals are a wonderful mixed bag like that.
Tom Sykes will be speaking in the Conservatory at 3pm on 29 June
Emily Howes, author of The Painter’s Daughter
I am standing in a cold church, wired up to a Britney mic. Rain is hammering outside, but the pews are full of audience members shaking off umbrellas and peeling away damp anoraks. It is my first literary festival as an
author, and my heart is beating with relief. Book-writing is a quiet, solitary commitment, driven by individual passion. But finally, right at the very end of it all, comes, hopefully, this moment of communion. My fellow debut authors share the highs and lows of book festivals in our newly formed Whatsapp group. The wobbly stools that threaten collapse at any moment. The stomach-lurching moment of silence before the first question. But above all, the joy and surprise of seeing that people have come, and care, and are interested in the work we have given four or five years of our lives to. Tomorrow I’ll sit down again in silence with only my dog and my laptop for company, and book two waiting in some corner of my mind to fill the blank screen. For now, though, there are piles of my finished first novel on the table, and I can savour how it feels to be able, finally, to share my first story, the untold story of Peggy and Molly Gainsborough, and to talk to other people about how it caught my imagination so vividly and privately for so long.
Emily Howes will be speaking in the Conservatory at 11.30am on 30 June
