Romans go digital

Five Leaves' current best-selling book is Roman Nottinghamshire. Four weeks in and we are planning a reprint. It is also quite obvious that at some stage there will have to be a second edition. A talk in Retford alone produced some gold dust. Meantime we have set up a dedicated microsite to gather all the latest Roman Nottinghamshire news. Who knew this was such a big area? We have also heard a rumour of someone else writing a book on Roman Notts. Typical, you wait 1600 years and two books come along at once. Here's the microsite.

http://romannottinghamshire.wordpress.com/

New Adrian Buckner pamphlet from Five Leaves

Bed Time Reading by Adrian Buckner is our first poetry pamphlet since 2007, though Adrian is no stranger to our list as his full collection, Contains Mild Peril, was published by us the same year. I've long been an admirer of Adrian's slow, thoughtful poems, since being on the appointment panel for when he was Nottinghamshire's one and only local Poet Laureate. He had a very successful year but the project funding could not be continued so he must remain a difficult answer to a question in some local literary quiz of the future. This pamphlet - in true Adrian style - comprises a second look at the books he first read in youth - Anna Karenina, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Auden, Primo Levi and others including, not surprisingly knowing his love of cricket, John Arlott's Test Match Diary 1953. This was a book written some years before Adrian's birth, but Arlott can only have had a reader like Adrian Buckner in mind while writing it. You can order via: http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/bed_time_reading_adrian_buckner_i022640.aspx

New Maxine Linnell book from Five Leaves

Maxine Linnell's time travel young adult novel Vintage was well received. In her new Five Leaves book, now available, Maxine turns to a more difficult issue - what happens when a father gets too close. This was an difficult book to edit as we were keen that the father in question was understood, not demonised, yet we had to be clear on the impact of his behaviour on the whole family. It is a book about love, about families, and about teenage friendship and trust as well. Maxine has taken on a difficult issue and dealt with it sensitively. Copies are available on:

http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/closer_maxine_linnell_i022633.aspx

New Anita Klein book from Five Leaves

Anita Klein is one of my favourite artists. We used a few of her illustrations as book covers in the past, then moved on to publishing/distributing her exhibition catalogues. Her new book - Through the Looking Glass - is her best yet, mostly because it is a very large format, which brings out the best in her images. The book includes paintings from her two lives - in London and Italy, and her Italian paintings definitely move into the sensual. You can find examples of her work at www.anitaklein.com. The new book is £24.95, and the production reflects its price. More on:

http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/anita_klein_through_the_looking_glass_i022634.aspx

Lowdham - a round up

"I love Lowdham, mostly because it is a village festival and isn’t suffocating. There is always something I want to go to, somebody I want to hear... Anyway, who can fault a book festival that one year featured cartoonists Posy Simmons, Steve Bell and the irascible Martin Rowson." This from an interview with the cartoonist "Brick" in LeftLion, online. Brick has spoken at the Festival a few times. Over on www.dumbles.co.uk there's a nice flavour of the Festival as well. There have been many other comments, but I like this website because we've always tried to create a quality book festival, but with the atmosphere of a village fete and that comes across. These days we also have events in other local villages, Caythorpe and Woodborough, but the heart of the Festival (for me) is the "last Saturday" in Lowdham, where we have a complete day of free events, a book fair, a cafe, a children's programme. We joke that my fellow organiser Jane Streeter's job is to bring in some big names over the Festival to make a profit, which I blow on marquees in one day. The biggest name this year was Stella Rimington (stepping in at the last minute for John Simpson - Lowdham must have been too scary for him). Stella is a spy novelist who used to head up MI5. Not so much the spy who came in from the cold as the spy who came in from Nottingham Girls' High School. She was certainly one of the best speakers we've had in our twelve years. There is some irony that the profits from her event, attended by 450 people, enabled us to put on an introduction to anarchism, held in the heartland of rural revolution, the Lowdham WI. Except it is not irony. We love and need "big names" at the Festival but have no time for Festivals that are only that. Equally important to us has been a range of smaller events - this time, for example, we included a talk on Buddhism and a friend of the Festival organised a Byron bike ride. But even small events are not that small - about 50 people came to the intro. to anarchism and a talk on the Moomins and philosophy was packed out. We also do our best to give platforms to East Midlands' writers - this year being particularly pleased that Stephen Edden (AKA Steve Hill) is now the second person in the village to become a professional writer (the other being the children's writer Elizabeth Baguley). The Festival also hosted the first East Midlands Book Award, with two of the Festival team and two others close to the Festival making up the Trustees.

The "last Saturday" started off with four full houses - talks on Roman Nottinghamshire, on England in the 1950s, on Shelley as punk rocker and on letter-writing in Jane Austen's novels. Meanwhile the children's marquee got going, which, later in the day, included appearances by the local Catfoot Theatre and children's writers Tom Palmer and Helena Pielichaty. By four the cafe was down to teabags - it was one of those days. But it was not the real last Saturday and we continued the next day with the Ian McMillan Orchestra in Nottingham (Lowdham Book Festival on Tour) and carry on, in fits and starts, until July 14th. The shape of this year's Festival is like a python that has swallowed a large meal - long and thin with a big bump in the middle.

One minor problem is money. After an exhausting tenth year (65 events in one week, plus a school's programme and a total attendance of about 6,000) the Festival was unable to secure Arts Council funding. We've had to scale back our schools' and outreach programme somewhat but still manage some work in nurseries, schools and care homes - calling in favours or drawing on our resources to pay for this important part of our work.

What does the future hold? Next year we enter our early teenage years. I hope we do more than sit in a corner and grunt or spend all our time staring at our mobiles, waiting from incoming texts. We'd like to revive our former schools' work, work with prisoners and excluded pupils, and we hope to put on the "green weekend" that we've been talking about for a few years but never got round to. All it takes is money and time... time and money. Meantime, there's a Five Leaves backlog to take care of.

East Midlands Book Award - a result

There is no doubt that that Shod, by Mark Goodwin, published by the small press Nine Arches, was the surprise - but unanimous - choice of the judges Ian McMillan, BBC man John Holmes and newly-retired Derbyshire Chief Librarian Jaci Brumwell at a well-attended awards ceremony last night. Mark said afterwards "I'm delighted to receive this award especially because it highlights poetry in the East Midlands, an area that is rich in poets". It was also a triumph for Nine Arches and their very active publisher Jane Commanne who edited this book. Mark lifted a cheque for £1000 and a trophy which Ian McMillan thought looked like that flame thing that British Gas used to use as their logo (I think he thought we bought it cheap), querying whether there really should be two "D"s in East Midlands and saying he was sure there was an "e" in East. Had people known I'd organised the trophy and proof-read the engraving some might have thought it was not a joke.

Ian talked through the whole list before returning to the winner saying that the judges found it hard to compare "apples to trombones" as they had to chose from entries across a range of genres. They agreed that the way to do it was not to try to compare in this way but to ask which book most clearly addressed its own genre, stood out from it, and said something new in that genre. The answer was Shod.

The local magazine LeftLion features reviews of all of the shortlisted books, as well as interviews with all the shortlisted writers. Read it here: http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/id/3742.

It's been an interesting project to work on for this last year. The founders and Trustees of the award are Jane Streeter (from Lowdham Book Festival), John Lucas (Five Leaves' writer and publisher at Shoestring Press), David Belbin (another writer at Five Leaves, but currently best known for his Tindal Street novel) and me. The project has been supported and administered by Aimee Wilkinson and Antonia Bell at Writing East Midlands. We have secured private funding to guarantee running the award for ten years but local legal firm Nelson's ensured a more comfortable budget for this first year. Hart's Restaurant provided a lovely reception for the shortlisted writers, the judges and Trustees, and Gardner's, the book wholesalers, printed attractive point of sale material.

Nominations are already open at Writing East Midlands for books published by East Midlands' writers in 2011 (www.writingeastmidlands.co.uk/awards). The new set of judges are Marion Shaw, former Professor of English at Loughborough, Debbie James from the bookshop in Kibworth in Leicestershire and the Rutland composer - our celeb judge - Gavin Bryars. Now that the project is established we expect more than the 46 entries of this year, so lots of reading for them. None of the judges live in Notts and as we push on to ensure that the EMBA is truly an East Midlands project the award ceremony will also be outside of Nottinghamshire.

Hopefully in this first year we have cleared up a lot of small details - what do we do if people live part-time in the East Midlands only? What about the writer who lives here but is published in the USA? How big should the shortlist be (next year it will be six maximum - easier for bookshops)?

What pleased us all was the enthusiasm from publishers, big and small, from well-published and less well-published writers. We found writers in the area we did not know lived here and are pleased that the East Midlands as a place to be a writer is just that little bit better than we were when we started.

Talking with Mark afterwards he said that he'd been pleased to get onto the shortlist, feeling that it was job done. The judges had been charged, however, with only shortlisting books that they would be comfortable with as winner so no book was shortlisted as a make weight or to appease particular constituencies. This year there were eight novels, and two poetry books. Next year the shortlist might only be children's and history books, or the same again. I'm looking forward to seeing the shortlist.

Well done Mark Goodwin. And well done to the shortlisted writers, who at least took a bottle of something nice home with them to drown their sorrows.

Ladino review

I mentioned here a few days ago that one of our books had been reviewed in a Catalan and Romani journal. Collectors of small languages will be pleased that our The Chaste Wife is reviewed in the current issue of Aki Yerushalayim, revista kulturala Djudeo-Espanyola. I can't help but feel that Elia Karmona's book (translated by Michael Alpert) should have had more attention as there are barely a handful of Ladino-related books published in Britain. The book includes a long introduction by the translator on Ladino literature. Ladino? The language spoken by the descendants of those Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, just holding on in Turkey and Israel and a few other places, spoken mostly by an ageing and decreasing number of people. Despite that the journal lists six other periodicals in Ladino, five dedicated websites, thirteen organisations and two radio programmes. Not bad for a language spoken by, what?, 20,000 people. As outlined in the introduction, Ladino has a weak literature tradition with books mostly being translated into Ladino rather than originating in the language. This is in marked contrast to the song writing tradition - as Ladino music is listened to all over the world.

The review itself is written in Roman script (as is the Ladino part of our book) rather than Hebrew or the Rashi script that Ladino was more traditionally written in - now that was a good way of securing its difficulties in continuity. Anyway, here's a section of the review:

The Chaste Wife... La Mujer Onesta es un livro ke puede ser meldado kon plazer i intereso no solo mar la majen ke mos da de este kampo del la kreation en ladino sino ke tambien por los komentarios del Dr Alpert sovre el estilo i el nivel literatario de este roman i las razones ke se topan al la baza sus karakteristikas, o sea la mizura en la kuala estos romanes bushkavan a responder a la demanda del publiko de lektores djudeo-espanyoles de fin del siglo 12 - prinsipios del siglo 20.