Monday 20 August 2012

Grow Your Tenner

Here's something that LitFest supporters should be interested in!  

Localgiving.com announces £500k Grow Your Tenner campaign

We are pleased to announce that our £500,000 Grow Your Tenner campaign will begin at 10am Tuesday 25th September to celebrate the launch of the new Localgiving.com monthly donations feature!

From 25th September Localgiving.com will encourage new supporters to make one-time and/or ongoing monthly donations on the website by matching up to £10 per donation. We’ve got a pot of £500,000 to match donations, and we will match up to £10 per donation until the pot is gone, raising awareness and funds for local charities and community groups across England.

So when a supporter gives £10, we’ll double it to £20! And even better- when a supporter signs up to donate £10/month to a local charity, we’ll match the first three months!

Our new monthly donations feature will enable supporters to give automatically and regularly to local charities through online Direct Debit.

Charities must have a paid subscription to be eligible to receive both one-time and monthly matched donations. Our records show that your charity is currently within your three month free trial.

Localgiving.com fundraising facts


  • In the last 12 months, nearly £2.5 million has been raised on Localgiving.com
  • Over 2,300 charities are currently using Localgiving.com to fundraise online
  • Localgiving.com is the UK’s leading website for local charities and community groups
  • We automatically process Gift Aid for charities and community groups
  • Your charity can gain access to new supporters and engage with them directly
  • Charities receive matched donations through Localgiving.com promotions like with our upcoming Grow Your Tenner campaign

Click here to learn more about the benefits of Localgiving.com

For general questions about fundraising with Localgiving.com, please contact us at help@localgiving.com

Best wishes,
The Localgiving.com Team

“Localgiving.com gives our charity a personal, high level of support and has raised our profile in the community.  Localgiving.com specifically supports those smaller, local charities that might otherwise slip under the radar, which is just great!”  Josie Hill, One25

Click here to view One25’s Localgiving.com webpage
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Wednesday 18 July 2012

Poetry Parnassus continues

The Poetry Parnassus continues. It aims to feature poets from all two hundred and four of the Olympic nations, and is curated by Simon Armitage. It's the largest-ever poetry event in Britain.

Read this Carcanet blog entry by Henry King to catch a flavour.

Wednesday 27 June 2012

Promised Land at The Carriageworks - Review



Richard Wilcocks writes:
Anthony Clavane spoke about his best-seller Promised Land: A Northern Love Story in an event entitled The Lingo of Sport, which took place in the New Headingley Club as part of the LitFest in March. He spoke about the diversity of his native city, about what it means to be a writer celebrating Leeds and about a certain football club with a remarkable history. “I’m working on a dramatic adaptation at the moment,” he told us, “along with a co-writer, Nick Stimson.

“It is going to be full of music, and probably dancing as well. It will be the same narrative, but things will be seen through the eyes of Nathan and Caitlin, two young people with plenty of ideals who are on two sides of a religious and cultural divide: Nathan is from a Jewish background while Caitlin’s ancestors were Irish Catholics.”

Somebody in the audience mentioned West Side Story. “No, not exactly that. It’s not a romantic tragedy. It’s more of an affirmation. They fall in love and get together and that’s it for them. There will be a lot of flashbacks to what happened at the turn of the twentieth century when Jews were arriving, escaping from pogroms in the Russian Empire, and also to the time when Don Revie was revered as the saviour of Leeds United, when The Mighty Whites reached the European Cup Final in Paris. The play is based on facts and research.”

Now that play with music (not ‘musical’) has launched at the Carriageworks, thanks to the Red Ladder Theatre Company and a very strong community cast. On the opening night (25 June), most of the audience fell in love with it: they clapped along, laughed and in some cases cried. I have seen a few ‘community plays’ and this was the best and most enjoyable by a long chalk in that wide category.

For a start, it is superbly-rehearsed, with tight and effective direction by Rod Dixon, who can turn a crowd of amateur (hard to believe) actors into a kind of dancing animal, sometimes aggressive and riotous, sometimes sublimely happy and sometimes chorus-like, commenting on the action. It becomes a crowd of swaying, chanting scarf-brandishers on the terraces, the inmates of a sweatshop somewhere near the Jewish ghetto (called The Leylands in Leeds), a bunch of vicious racists addressed up by a ranting anti-semite and much else. There is stirring music from the Red Ladder Band, I think not enough of it: there could have been at least one more Klezmer number and one more song with an Irish flavour. The footwork is nifty at all times.

Nathan, who represents Clavane, is played by the talented Paul Fox with wit and charm. The author must feel flattered, indulged even. Lynsey Jones is an equally charming Caitlin, and she acts (and plays guitar) with real spirit. Steve Morrell is a very credible David, stallholder in Kirkgate Market and Nick Ahad plays an exploiting boss as a cross between a cartoon capitalist in a top hat and a soft-edged gangster.

Yes, the story is predictable, mainly because it has to be, because it is based on local history and we know that the action is going to end up… here, and yes, the two lovers face only the small problem of their parents’ prejudices (a really funny scene with the two mothers discussing their offspring while drinking tea on a sofa) rather than a secret marriage and murderous relatives, but that’s not the point. The point is that it is a celebration, which might be a bit earnest and possibly a little sentimental, as we hang on those two words ‘Leeds’ and ‘United’.

There are scenes in it which remind us, as well, that we have no reason to feel smug in this country after watching that Panorama programme on crudely racist football hooligans in Poland and the Ukraine. We had them here in the seventies, just as bad. Some of them are still active.

It’s quite an achievement, to turn a book like that into good night out at the theatre.


Tuesday 19 June 2012

Egyptian Evening in MINT - المصرية مساء

Marcos is organising this. He's the boss of MINT café in North Lane, Headingley and he was over the moon when the LitFest collaborated with him on a terrific Lebanese Evening in March, which had a bellydancer on the programme along with poems in English and Arabic by the likes of Khalil Gibran and Mahmoud Darwish. 


Now there's going to be an Egyptian Evening on Friday 29 June at 8.30pm with Helena Bellydancer, who will not only dance but talk about the remarkable Lady Lucy Duff Gordon (pictured), who was a mid-Victorian translator and travel writer. Her three volumes of travel letters were not originally intended for publication, and perhaps owe their honest style and natural tone to this fact. 


There will be some other readings too, in Arabic and English - for example from the works of Nizar Qabbani, a poet revered in the Arab world.



The food in MINT is brilliant - you can order an authentic mezze buffet for seven pounds if you want to try it. Entry at the door is three pounds.

Warm and wonderful

Warm and wonderful in the HEART café on 8 June!  Amongst the friends - a bunch of school students, poets all. Singers too. Stella Litras brought along her keyboard and guitar - and a brilliant young group called Caution!

 In the picture - Michelle and Becky.