Clapham Omnibus and the mystery of Aeronwy Thomas

We are pleased to reprint an article from the Clapham Omnibus newsletter about the recent Pamela Hansford Johnson exhibition. The exhibition is now closed - though available for elsewhere if anyone has any ideas. For more information on Clapham Omnibus, see http://www.omnibus-clapham.org/. Thanks to Clapham Omnibus for hosting the exhibition, the nice photo and permission to reprint the article.
The last hurrah for Omnibus before the fate of the Old Clapham Library is known was the launch of an exhibition about local writer Pamela Hansford Johnson. The exhibition, timed to mark the centenary of her birth on 29 May 1912, was opened by her daughter Lindsay, Lady Avebury, on Thursday 10 May.

Born in London, Pamela lived with her mother’s theatrical family at 53 Battersea Rise until she was 22, the year that she wrote her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre. (Her father, who worked for the Baro Kano railway on the Gold Coast, now Ghana, died when she was 12.) She attended Clapham County Girls’ Grammar School, and had her first poems published while still a pupil, continuing to write while later working as a stenographer for a bank. As a teenager, she was briefly the girlfriend of the poet Dylan Thomas but went on to marry first Neil Stewart in 1936 and then the novelist C P Snow in 1950.
A prolific writer, her lifetime output included 27 novels, seven short plays for the theatre and radio, short stories, critical works, sociological studies and a memoir. The exhibition includes family photographs, documents, hand-written manuscripts, original copies of some of her books, posters advertising them, and even her own typewriter, a vintage Imperial Good Companion.
Some 60 people attended the opening, many taking advantage of the discounted price on copies of This Bed Thy Centre, which has just been reissued by Five Leaves Publications. A story about adolescent love and sex (which Lady Avebury explained her mother had imagined, being a virgin still when she wrote it), the novel caused a stir when it first appeared – for its content, its title (endowed by Dylan Thomas) and the author’s young age – and was banned from Battersea Rise Library.
Curiously, the visitors’ book for the exhibition includes the entry: “Aeronwy Thomas, May, North London. Thanks for the pleasure of seeing my father’s photo, circa 1934”. As Dylan Thomas’s daughter Aeronwy died in 2009, Omnibus is intrigued to know who signed the book in her name.
Omnibus has submitted its bid to run the Old Library as a community-led arts centre. Lambeth Council is now considering all the shortlisted bids for both community and commercial proposals, and expects to announce the successful bidder in early to mid-June.

Poets in Beeston returns

The illustration here is of the cover of one of our earliest books, from 1996 (and, yes, it is still available) - an anthology celebrating the 15th year of Poets in Beeston, a series of readings in Nottingham organised by Robert Gent, who edited the book. The anthology includes poets including Danny Abse, Fleur Adcock, James Berry... through to Ken Smith and Charles Tomlinson. The book was launched with Jackie Kay as the guest poet. Over the years everybody who was anybody in the British poetry world (and a few overseas guests) read at Beeston, the series being very generously supported by Nottinghamshire County Council. The series should have closed when Robert moved on, but was passed to my tender mercies and was wound down after a couple of years for all sorts of reasons, including the development of other readings elsewhere in the County.
Well, life moves on, and sometimes back in circles so, after some discussion between Five Leaves, Nottingham Poetry Society and Nottinghamshire Libraries, Beeston Poets returns in the autumn. For months we'd been talking about a series "something like Beeston Poets" before realising that what we really wanted was to re-establish Poets in Beeston. That is exactly what we will do, in the same venue as of old, which has been recently renovated. Robert thinks it is a good idea too! Pippa Hennessy will be leading on the project from Five Leaves, together with our sometime author Cathy Grindrod, their fellow NPS member Jeremy Duffield and Sheelagh Gallagher and Gill Rockett from Notts Libraries. Because of course it takes five or six people to do the work that Robert did on his own.
Times have changed - Notts County Council can't put in the money of old, but we'll have a dedicated website and email list as our main publicity (which features had not been on the go last time round). We might not have the money this time to put on some of the biggest names and some of the old Beeston favourites - UA Fanthorpe, Jon Silkin, Adrian Mitchell and others are no longer with us, but there will be some new kids on the block. And we'll have a cafe atmosphere.
The opening programme will launch this October with, appropriately, Jackie Kay, followed by Neil Astley from Bloodaxe in November and Five Leaves' Andy Croft in December. Dates and details will follow.

Pork scratchings optional

East Midlands Book Award 2012

Anne Zouroudi is the winner of this year's East Midlands Book Award, for her crime novel The Whispers of Nemesis (Bloomsbury), set, like her others, in Greece.  Anne was shortlisted last year, but this year only had to travel across the hill from her home to the wonderful venue of Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. Of course, come the revolution, every working class family will live somewhere just as splendid, but it was great to be welcomed into one of the most attractive buildings in the county. The EMBA award was held as the final event of Derbyshire Literature Festival, so thanks to Lord and Lady Manners for opening their home, to Derbyshire County Council (whose leader proudly announced that they had not closed any libraries, unlike other authorities - it has always been, Labour or Conservative, a big supporter of literature) and to Writing East Midlands for organising the Award on behalf of the trustees.
Anne picked up a cheque for £1000, presented by the composer Gavin Bryars, the celeb judge brought in at the shortlisting stage to join bookseller Debbie James and academic Marion Shaw. Gavin gave a terrific extempore speech about each book, and compared the craft of composing to that of the writer. We have already signed him up for Lowdham Book Festival next year.
Of the other shortlisted writers, Paula Rawsthorne was already glowing having been in Leeds that afternoon where she picked up the Leeds children's book award for her The Truth About Celia Frost (Usborne), her shortlisted title here. She was a bit shell-shocked from speaking to 500 teenagers.
The other shortlisted writers were Gregory Woods (An Ordinary Dog, Carcanet), Sunjeev Sahota (Ours Are the Streets, Picador), Laura Owen (The Misadventures of Winnie the Witch, OUP) and Kerry Young (Pao, Bloomsbury).
Five out of six titles then were from independent publishers. Three are first books, which indicates great promise for the future health of writing in the region.
We don't have our external/celebrity judge yet for next year, but we are pleased to announce that the two judges who have to read ALL the books will be Mel Read (former MEP for the East Midlands, now an active member of Leicester Writers Club) and Robert Gent (Robert ran Beeston Poets series for, I think, seventeen years and edited the celebratory collection Poems for the Beekeeper for Five Leaves in 1996).
Nominations for the 2013 award, for books published in 2012, are now open - see www.writingeastmidlands.co.uk for details.

Lowdham Book Festival 2012

The programme is now available, at www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk, where it can be viewed or downloaded. This is the thirteenth Festival, and though the programme is in the name of Jane Streeter and I, Jane has had to do most of the work this year. Every draft copy of the programme seemed to add another event or two. These range from a dog walk (there is a bookish reason, but nonetheless a rarity at book festivals - next year we go for the gerbil market) through to an evening with Ben Fogle. The Festival runs throughout June, with the last ten days being the core. Several Five Leaves "irregulars" put in an appearance - John Harvey, Jon McGregor, Chris Arnot, Stephen Booth, John Lucas, Alan Gibbons - but the only event dedicated to one of our books is Peter Mortimer talking about his new Made in Nottingham on 30th June.
Lowdham regulars will immediately notice that the traditional "last day" jamboree is not happening this year. This is largely because that has always been one of my jobs and I've not been around much, but it will return, refreshed, next year. Nevertheless the Festival includes 36 writers, 7 musicians, several craft workers, two storytelling troupes, one dog walker, six writers groups (in the fringe festival) and one rather large food festival.
Back in the mists of time, after the first Festival, we surveyed our public - did you want us to carry on with book festivals or would you prefer an arts festival? Opinion formers said "arts festival", but vox pop said "book festival". At the time such things were less common, and we concluded that people liked the prestige of a book festival, but were happy for us to cover other arts under that banner. So we've done theatre, film, early music, rock music, classical music, sports (OK, that isn't an art form, not even at my home town team of Hawick Royal Albert), and we've dabbled in food - but an all day food festival is new.
If you can't go to everything... my recommendation is our annual Readers Day (on June 30), with Jon McGregor performing his own man show based on This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You after which he will interview John Harvey. Oxygen Books is running a "City-Pick Nottingham" session, reading from local writers from the past and present. The whole day costs £20, which includes lunch, tea and coffee and a comp copy of McGregor or Harvey's latest hardback. A bargain. This annual day is being used as a model around the country.
I may not have had such a big hand in the Festival this year, but Pippa at the Five Leaves office did, designing and typesetting the programme.

New from Five Leaves: Blood Tears by Michael Malone

Michael Malone's Blood Tears is now in our office - bookshop stock will start to go out next week. We have described this novel as Scottish Catholic Noir, though the biggest problem in publishing it was not the wrath of the big man upstairs, but trying to get our two proof-readers to understand that people from the West of Scotland really do say "Come aff it", and that "aff" is not a misprint. There were many such changes where the Scottish wing of Five Leaves had to recorrect the corrections, sometimes twice. Perhaps I should have sent my colleagues on a training course involving reruns of early editions of Taggart. Michael Malone comes from Ayrshire, the home of Burns, though there is little poetic about his rather dark book. It did raise the issue of "dialect" though. The main text and the dialogue had to be comprehensible to Michael's readers outside of Scotland, but had to sound right to those within that country. By and large I share the general view in creative writing that dialect should be avoided, save for a little salting of the text to give flavour. Some writers, Lewis Grassic Gibbon for example, used mostly standard English but you can feel the rhythms of Scottish speech in his Sunset Song. With Blood Tears we were aiming for something more direct but I hope we have not clipped too much off Malone's coin in pandering to the southerners. Blood Tears is the first of a series by Michael Malone, meaning we now have two Scottish crime series running, with a new Russel McLean out this autumn.
Blood Tears is available from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/blood-tears/, though overseas readers will find it cheaper to order via http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ to get free overseas postage.

Letter of the week

Hi there Ross,
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