Here at Dulwich Books we’re hitting the ground running in 2012. Not only are we holding the Dulwich Books Festival in March, but in February we are going to be trying out something a little different.
We’ve lined up some exciting events with three progressive independent publishers to make up the inaugural Dulwich Books Indie Presses series; there’ll be poetry, prose, translation, a journal, and meetings with strangers…
We see this series as an opportunity to discover excellent new writing, hear interesting positions on the world of books today and engage in the debate about where independent, free-thinking writing and publishing might be headed in the future. Please come along with questions on these matters or for the authors themselves – we want to get people talking!
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To open the Dulwich Books Indie Presses series, we’re delighted to be welcoming London based writer and blogger Gemma Selzter. She will be reading from and discussing her book Speak to Strangers, which began life as a daily, interactive blog project, meeting one hundred strangers in one hundred London days, and recording the encounters in funny, enigmatic hundred-word pieces, treading the line between short story and prose poem.
Tom Chivers is the publisher of Penned in the Margins and an acclaimed poet, with several collections to his name, as well as Stress Fractures, a collection of essays on poetry and City State, an anthology of London Poetry. His work often draws on the capital, its history, topography and the ways our interactions with the city are shaped by technology and modernity. He will read from How to Build City, and some new work.
Featured Press: Penned in the Margins
Gemma Seltzer: Speak to Strangers
Poetry from Tom Chivers
2nd February 7pm, FREE!
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For the second event in our Indie Presses series, Deborah Levy will be speaking about her recent novel Swimming Home, where a seemingly ordinary, middle-class villa holiday is disturbed by the arrival of Kitty Finch, ‘a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water.’ John Self wrote in the Guardian that Swimming Home ‘has taken worn structures and made something strange and new.’ Swimming Home will also be Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime from the week beginning 27th February.
Afterwards Rosalind Harvey, translator of Guardian First Book Prize-nominated Down the Rabbit Hole, by Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos, will talk about translating the novel and literary translation in general. We have limited signed copies of Juan Pablo’s book, which has been a surprise best seller at Dulwich Books!
Featured Press: And Other Stories
Deborah Levy: Swimming Home
Rosalind Harvey: translating Down the Rabbit Hole
9th February 7pm, FREE!
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To round out the Dulwich Books Indie Presses series, the well-loved journal Slightly Foxed will be having a party to celebrate the launch of their first ever paperback editions!
The paperbacks will be the soft-cover pick of their hardback range, re-publishing classic memoirs which have undeservedly slipped out of print. Ysenda Maxtone Graham will be talking about her hilarious and unusual Mr Tibbit’s Catholic School, a memoir-cum-history of St Philip’s school, of which A. N. Wilson writes, ‘Ysenda has the passionate nosiness of the novelist…she knows how a tiny detail can bring a whole character, a whole scene, to life.’
Slightly Foxed editor Gail Pirkis will also be speaking about editing a journal that, in their own words, is ‘more like a bookish friend’ than a regular periodical.
Featured Press: Slightly Foxed
Launch party for Slightly Foxed paperback editions
Ysenda Maxtone Graham and editor Gail Pirkis
23rd February 6.30pm, FREE!
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Exciting Events Booked at Dulwich Books for 2012! Click here to find out more. Follow us on Twitter @dulwichbooks
