Authors Electric

Tennessee Fields - went ahead in 2021 All set again for 2022 It’s festival time. Book festivals, music festivals, dance festivals, beer festivals, curry festivals, car festivals. There are garden festivals, BBQ festivals, happenings, experiences, shows, regattas, fetes, fairs - and fayres.  Margery Allingham makes a guest appearance  Our family summer is dominated by Georgeanna’s Tennessee Fields Country Music Festival (July 15 th – 17 th this year) and I’ve lost count of the number of years Francis and I have been participating in the Felixstowe Book Festival, always the last weekend in June and different every time. I've joined in with dementia life-stories, primary school adventure sessions, boats and books, ebooks, detective stories, children's writing competitions and have introduced novel writing friends such as Jane Thynne, Amanda Craig, Salley Vickers. This year it's Suffolk and the Sea on Saturday while Francis is interviewing Justin Webb ; then Celebrating Ma...

Festive flags at Boomtowm  I’ll never feel quite the same about festivals. Over the last few years I’ve written several posts in response to my happy experiences at the Felixstowe Book Festival . But I've usually been looking from a performer's point of view -- never exactly undervaluing the efforts of organiser Meg Reid and her volunteers, but not setting them centre stage.  Earlier this year, observing my daughter Georgie Thorogood turning her vision of Dixie Fields (her debut country music festival) into reality, I began to get a glimpse of the extraordinary level of challenge faced by all festival organisers. (And here's to you too, Ros Green, at the Essex Book Festival. ) In May I wrote a blogpost apologising to my fictional character, Lottie Livesey, for giving her a festival organiser's role to ensure she was sufficiently off-stage in Pebble to allow my child characters an unimpeded adventure. Poor Lottie, when I'd side-lined her previously (in  A...

Arthur Ransome’s eighth novel,  Secret Water, is eighty this year. It’s his only Essex novel and this anniversary has prompted a 'hub' weekend of events in Harwich during the county's book festival in March. It also prompts the question what does it mean for a book to be eighty? An eightieth birthday, celebrated in 2019, means that the book was published in 1939 -- and in Secret Water ’s case it's likely that most of it was written during that peculiarly unsettling year.  Publication date for Secret Water was 28th November 1939,  when Britain had already been at war for almost three months. In those days the period between a book’s delivery and its publication could be very short. In a letter to his mother, dated Sept 18 th  1939, Ransome reports: ‘The new book, as I told you, has gone to the printers and I am now full blast with pictures and maps trying to get them done before the proofs arrive. I’ve done some big maps and a little one. Four full pag...

Claudia Myatt's new cover for A Ravelled Flag I knew it was going to be a successful outing as soon as I got the teacher's response to the weather forecast. It was mid-October and we'd planned to take her class of ten-year olds exploring alongside the River Stour in Suffolk. I'd warned her already that they might get wet feet by the end of the day but now I needed to tell her that we were also likely to encounter rain and strong winds. Not a hurricane, you understand, but gusts that might reach 40mph and possible heavy showers.She'll cancel, I thought to myself gloomily. I was part of the way through a project for the Essex Book Festival, working with schools in the Tendring Hundred area of Essex. My job was to talk about the stories in my Strong Winds series, then encourage the children to write adventures of their own. Each school wanted something slightly different. The headteacher of this school (herself a sailing enthusiast) suggested that the Y6 ...

Jaywick Martello Tower When you think of a literary festival you think tasteful: You think Edinburgh, Oxford, Cheltenham, Harrogate, Bath and countless smaller events in delightful venues such as Aldeburgh, Southwold, Ilkley, Henley-on-Thames. You don't think Jaywick. It's quite possible that you never think of Jaywick at all – unless you're an architectural historian interested in the plotlands of the early twentieth century (read Arcadia for All by Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward) or you're a planner or a project manager concerned with the indices of deprivation. Jaywick is on the flatlands, west of Clacton on Sea in Essex. In 1928 developer Frank Stedman bought several hundred acres of marsh grazing on which he founded the Jaywick Sands Estate. He'd hoped to build permanent houses but Clacton council refused co-operation over the rather important issue of mains drainage so Stedman sold freehold beachplots of 1000 sq feet plus a hut. These were heavily ...