Headingley LitFest: June 2008

Tuesday, 17 June 2008

BIG SUMMER

Keep it bubbling. That's the expression. Let's keep it bubbling. The LitFest will take place in March 2009 - last two weeks. Lots of stuff in the pipeline......Beryl Bainbridge says she wants to come (she spoke to Richard Wilcocks after a reading in Haworth recently).....Colm Toibin has been invited but hasn't replied yet.....Bob Barnard (crime writer as well as Brontë expert) will definitely come, with a talk entitled 'Making Crime Pay' (he used that title when he toured prisons in an educational capacity) and there will be puppets for the very young......all still in transit but will exit into the real world soon.

In the meantime, the bubbles. On Wednesday 16 July at Café Lento on North Lane at 7pm (come early to avoid squeezing in at the last moment) there will be an INTERIM EVENT entitled BIG SUMMER.

That should cover most things....horror....romance....politics....humour....and it will be a SHORT STORY EVENING. These tend to take up a lot more time than snappy poems, so the audience is expected to be sober and patient. Patient anyway. Plenty of coffee.

Ted Marriott and Richard Wilcocks (me) are the booked readers of their short stories. If you have got one, you'll be better off telling people beforehand - contact the blog or come into the cafe to chat with Richard Lindley. It's all free.

LITERARY HEADINGLEY

Headingley is just the place for it! Don't expect a big circus with marquees, though: we're not at that stage yet. We're all volunteers as well.

Our venues include the HEART Centre on Bennett Road, the New Headingley Club on St Michael's Road, friendly cafés, historic local cinemas, Headingley Library, people's houses and the historic Leeds Library in Commercial Street, city centre.

Headingley's Literary Links

Headingley has strong connections with many writers:

Arthur Ransome was born in Headingley, J R R Tolkien lived at 5 Holly Bank and also at 2 Darnley Road, West Park when he was reader in English Language at the University of Leeds 1920 - 25, Alan Bennett lived over a butcher's shop opposite the Three Horseshoes, now Royale Dry Cleaners.

Lucy Newlyn has published poetry about her early life in Headingley, George Orwell stayed at 21 Estcourt Avenue with his sister Marjorie and her husband Humphrey 'Humpy' Dakin (with whom he visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth), T S Eliot used to visit his mother-in-law in Weetwood Lane, William Fryer Harvey was brought up in Spring Bank, Trevor Griffiths lived just off Victoria Road on Winstanley Terrace, Jon Silkin's first office of STAND magazine was his flat at 144 Otley Road, Sir Geoffrey Hill lived in Shire Oak Road, Peter Redgrove lived in Headingley between 1962 and 1965 when he was Gregory Fellow of Poetry at the University of Leeds, and playwright Kay Mellor still lives near The Hollies in Far Headingley.

Wilson Barrett, the charismatic first manager of the Grand Theatre, Leeds (a prolific playwright as well), lived in Beech Grove Terrace, Woodhouse in the 1870s. His house was a meeting place for many writers, artists and visitors to Leeds - such as W. S. Gilbert, George Grossmith and Atkinson Grimshaw.

Headingley LitFest 2020 was the thirteenth. The fourteenth will take place from March 2021 and will be adapted to the rules of the Covid pandemic. We are now a proud part of the annual Leeds Lit Fest.