Dundee Literary Festival 2012 - Friday 26th October

26
Oct

Caithness Writers session

10 am

As part of the Festival’s ongoing project to introduce Dundee audiences to the work of artists living in the Far North, we welcome you to a celebration of the life of David Morrison who died recently.

Poet and sculptor David was founder of the radical arts and literary magazine The Scotia Review and is director of Pultney Press. His son, the novelist Ewan Morrison was born in Caithness and will be discussing his most recent books, Tales from the Mall and Close Your Eyes. Writer, historian and collagist Jenny Bruce will be in conversation with artist Merran Gunn about the ways in which image and idea may be layered and mixed to create stories. An enchanted and inspiring hour.

26
Oct

Tom Pow on Europe’s vanishing villages

Tom Pow

11am

One of the great shifts in modern human history has been the migration from rural to urban areas, and the effects of this countryside depopulation and the plummeting rural birthrate are being felt keenly throughout Europe. Tom Pow sets out to explore what this means in some of the most rapidly vanishing areas using travelogue, essay, story and poem - to make connections between what he encounters in these dying villages with his own experiences of memory, identity and loss.

26
Oct

A Poem and a Piece

David Kinloch

12 noon

David Kinloch was born, brought up and educated in Glasgow. Since 2003 he has been teaching Creative Writing and Scottish Literature at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, where he is currently Reader in Poetry. He is the author of five collections of poetry and was a founder and editor of the internationally respected poetry magazine Verse.

26
Oct

Nick Robinson on Politics, Power and the Media

Nick Robinson

1pm

The relationship between those who wield power and those whose job it is to tell us what they are doing has always been fraught with tension. Politicians these days are used to 24-hour rolling news channels, blogs and Twitter but it was not always this way. Nick Robinson’s timely book Live from Downing Street takes us on an absorbing journey through the history of the conflict between journalists and the government of the time. It provides a colourful and personal examination of what life is like as the BBC’s Political Editor and reveals his own considered view of the controversial issue of impartial reporting.

26
Oct

The Great Tenement Battle: Dundee vs. Glasgow

Robert Douglas & Mae Stewart

2pm

Mae Stewart and Robert Douglas were both brought up in the 1940s and 1950s and both have used their childhood experiences and memories to form the basis of their books. Mae’s two autobiographies have found her a huge audience with their mix of gentle humour and nostalgia. Robert Douglas wrote about his tenement childhood in Night Song of the Last Tram and has now gone on to write a trilogy of novels set in a fictional Glasgow tenement. Come along and share your memories of back courts and middens, of picture houses and dance halls and of steamies and washies!

26
Oct

Andy Coogan

3pm

The oldest child of poor Irish immigrants, Andy Coogan’s Tomorrow You Die begins with his recollections of life in Glasgow’s slums during the 1920s and ‘30s. It is his gripping war story that will linger long in your mind, beginning with jungle fighting against Japanese invaders in Malaya in 1942 and ending with the dropping of the Atom bomb just 20 miles from Andy’s prisoner of war camp.

As a young man, Andy was tipped for Olympic glory before war service interrupted his promising running career and it was this athleticism and spirit that allowed him to survive an ordeal that killed so many.

Andy has lived in Carnoustie for many years and this is a great opportunity to hear a local hero’s extraordinary stoty.

26
Oct

Tea & Mystery in the 1950s

Sara Sheridan & Maureen Reynolds

4pm

Join us for a 1950s-style afternoon tea to celebrate the new books from these two authors. Maureen Reynolds has written a series of gentle detective novels set in the 1950s in Dundee featuring Molly McQueen, and Sara Sheridan’s Brighton Belle introduces us to Mirabelle Bevan and the first in a series of mysteries set in 1950s Brighton.

26
Oct

Max Benitz on Afghanistan

Max Benitz

5pm

Max Benitz reports from the frontline of a highly controversial war in a perceptive and revealing account of several months spent in Afghanistan with The Scots Guards, training with them and living amongst them as they undertake their tour in Helmand province. Fascinating and illuminating, his book reveals new insights into the war raging in Afghanistan and the men and women who bravely serve there for the British forces.

In this illustrated talk Max will give us a unique insight into the pressures faced by those who risk their lives every second of the day in one of the most dangerous places on earth.

26
Oct

Finding Sanctuary

Albert Bogle

6pm

We’re delighted to welcome Albert Bogle, Moderator of the Church of Scotland, to Dundee. As well as discussing some of today’s most pressing issues - what does community mean to us - he’ll be reading from his new prayer collection, Sanctuary. He describes it as a book of ‘street prayers’, all of which he wrote on various plane and train journeys. He insists that they are ‘not pieces of polished prose, but rather the thoughts of a traveller connecting with the world’. Some very entertaining stories lie behind his reflections, and the Moderator will be happy to read from, and talk about the making of, the book which is foreworded by the Archbishop of York.

26
Oct

101 World Whiskies Tasting

Ian Buxton

7pm

In this companion guide to 101 Whiskies To Try Before You Die, Ian Buxton recommends another 101 whiskies that he believes every whisky lover should taste. This time Ian casts the net wider to include whiskies from Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Wales.

Join Ian for an educational and intoxicating evening of unforgettable drams.

26
Oct

Killer Cookbook launch

8pm

Join Scottish crime-writers Caro Ramsay and Frank Muir for the launch of The Killer Cookbook: the grisliest approach to dinner since Hannibal Lecter cooked up brains for Clarice Starling. Caro and Frank will be joined by some crime-writing friends to talk about how food fits into their modus operandi. There’ll also be drinks and canapes to eat if you dare.

The Killer Cookbook is a gory, gritty collection of recipes from the likes of Jeffery Deaver, Peter James, Val McDermid, Stuart MacBride, Mark Billingham and Ian Rankin, edited by Caro Ramsay and illustrated by Steve Carroll. It’s gruesome, it’s twisted, and it also contains the perfect recipe for Mushroom Soup. All proceeds from the sale of the book will go to the Million for a Morgue campaign (www.millionforamorgue.com).

26
Oct

From Sunset Strip to Tayside

Christopher Brookmyre & Billy Franks

9pm

Best-selling Scottish author Christopher Brookmyre has written fifteen novels, some of which took their cue – and even their titles -- from the music of Billy Franks. In the summer of 2005, Billy and three friends took an eight-month journey across America and Europe on a daring if improbable mission to get ten of the world’s most famous recording artists to record a tribute album to an unknown songwriter: Billy himself. Billy’s book A Far Cry From Sunset chronicles a fraught and often hilarious journey that taught its travellers much about the nature and realities of fame. Join the pair of them for a raucous evening of tales and tunes, sharing the stories that inspired Billy’s songs, and performing the songs that inspired Christopher’s stories.