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Literature Festival
- South Specific
'The British Lawnmower Museum is one of the nation’s
great treasures. We British are rightly proud of our lawns,
which give our green and pleasant land a lot of its green-and-pleasant-ness.
The lawnmower, so redolent of Sunday morning pottering in
the garden and glorious sixes scored over baize-smooth cricket
pitches, is one of the things that make us who we are.' This
is an excerpt from the book Bollocks to Alton Towers,
whose four authors are appearing at South Specific, the main
literary event in the Brighton Festival, which is taking place
at the Gardner Arts Centre this weekend. The festival offers
workshops and talks from a number of the southern counties’
top writers, designed for readers and writers alike. Bollocks
to Alton Towers is an irreverent look at how we Brits
publicly display our obsessions, from garden gnome exhibitions
to lawnmower museums.
It’s a far cry from the event that follows it, a discussion
of poetry from two of the country’s best exponents of
the art, Penelope Shuttle and Fiona Sampson. Shuttle, the
widow of Peter Redgrove, is shortly to publish a collection
about bereavement, Redgrove’s Wife. Sampson,
editor of the Poetry Review, has just published the
verse-novel The Distance Between Us. Other writers
to appear in today’s programme include Katherine McMahon,
Sophia MacDougall and Segun Afolabi. There is also a series
of innovative collaborations between visual artists and poets,
excerpts of which have been published in Viva Lewes, entitled
Project Poetry. AG
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