An inconvenient truth 2
Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the car Increases in the price of food and fuel are causing concern here, and hardship around the world. How can we understand the underlying...
A Jubilee for First World Debtors
Consumers in Anglo-American economies are engulfed by credit/debt. Poor borrowers and homeowners, as well as businesses, find themselves deserted by the ‘guardians of the nation's finances' --...
Speaker(s): Ann PettiforLive By Gandhi/Learn By Google: Faith In A Digital Democracy 1
Digital media culture has transformed the way ideas and information are gathered and shared, but what does this mean for faith in the 21st century? What does religion look like now? Barry Taylor is...
Conversations with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is famous for writing the Sherlock Holmes adventures. But while these gave him wealth, this literary man sought paradise in speaking with the dead. His friend Harry Houdini...
Speaker(s): Simon ParkeDark Eden
Eden is a planet without a star, which is why it's dark. It isn't completely dark though. There is life there, powered by the planet's own heat. And that life gives out light. This is a story...
Where Words Can Go but Not Return
Philip Gross reads from his latest poetry collection, Deep Field (shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2012), which movingly charts his elderly father's journey into deep aphasia and deafness,...
Pairidaeza: the Old Persian for Paradise
Drawing on her memories of life in Iran, Mimi Khalvati's poems are full of love and longing, lost maternal Edens and paradisal gardens. Her readings will interweave the classical forms of Persian...
Every Second, The Messiah: A Performed Reading from The Late Walter Benjamin
The Late Walter Benjamin juxtaposes the life and death of the German-Jewish Marxist intellectual Walter Benjamin with the grinding reality of a working-class London council estate in post-war...
Money Flows to The Author: Making Books Pay in the 21st Century
It used to be so simple. Publishers paid writers and then published the books they wrote. Then the internet happened and the traditional publishing model became unsustainable. How can an author earn...
Speaker(s): Simon MordenWhat To Do While You’re Waiting For Paradise
How do writers motivate themselves when they know their novel might never be published? What to do while waiting to hear from agents? Does self-publishing ruin credibility? Emerging writer...
Itch: A Reading
The tale of a curious schoolboy searching out all the elements in the periodic table, the story features missing eyebrows, schoolbag arsenic, and a whole host of dangerous situations. Find out the...
Speaker(s): Simon MayoCommunion
The poet Denise Levertov, talks of saving paradise when she says: “we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life, how it might be to live as siblings with...
Writing My Way Home
Jenn Ashworth reads from her two published novels, A Kind of Intimacy and Cold Light, as well as from her forthcoming book, The Friday Gospels. As all are set in her native Lancashire, Jenn will...
Just Dwelling: Paradise Lose and Saved in Literature
From Milton to Atwood, the canon abounds with stories of perfect worlds destroyed by human folly. Dr Tate explores competing versions of paradise imagined by writers including HG Wells, JG Ballard...
Speaker(s): Andrew TateWild Life: A Reading
Join Rupert as he reads from The Fantasy Kid, his book of poems for children, and debuts some new material. Poet Rupert Loydell travels the southwest as a visiting lecturer, writer and painter. He...