Plymouth International Book Festival

Live & Loud 2: Dizraeli

Part of Plymouth International Book Festival

Rapper, writer, poet and singer, Dizraeli is a hip hop tour de force.

Tackling politics, love, rain, supermarkets, grief, drug culture and masculinity with a sense of humour and directness that can sometimes make you wince, Dizraeli is the BBC Radio 4 Poetry Slam winner and the 2006/7 Farrago UK Slam Poetry Champion. He has also authored hip hop play The Rebel Cell, co-written with Baba Brinkman which won Spirit Of The Fringe award and rave reviews at the Edinburgh Festival. Join Dizraeli at the Plymouth...

We Are Poets: Film Screening

Part of Plymouth International Book Festival

WE ARE POETS presents a moving and radical documentary of youth, art and freedom of expression, as a remarkable team of six British teenagers are chosen to represent the UK at Brave New Voices: the most prestigious Poetry Slam competition in the world. From their inner-city lives on the red bricked backstreets of Northern England, to a stage in front of the White House in Washington DC, the young poets explosively lay bare the concerns of a generation as they take on the world and prepare for a transformational and...

The Gospel According to Cane, Courttia Newland

Part of Plymouth International Book Festival

Courttia Newland, novelist, playwright and screenwriter joins us to speak about his latest novel, The Gospel According to Cane.

His other novels include Snakeskin, The Dying Wish and The Scholar. Newland has been shortlisted for several awards, including the CWA Dagger, the Frank O' Connor and the Edge Hill awards.

About The Gospel According to Cane: Beverley Cottrell had a dream life: a prestigious job, a beautiful husband and new baby boy. But then, one winter afternoon, when her son was barely a few...

The Pre-War House and Other Stories by Alison Moore

Part of Plymouth International Book Festival

A writer whose star is definitely on the rise, Alison Moore will be in conversation with Johnny Mains, award winning editor, biographer and horror historian.

Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the New Writer of the Year Category in the 2012 National Book Awards. She’ll be reading from her latest collection of short fiction, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, which includes stories shortlisted for more than a dozen different awards.

“The level of...

Ben Okri, Modern Griot

Part of Plymouth International Book Festival

Story tellers are keepers of our history, commentators on our present and seers for our future. In this session the internationally acclaimed Ben Okri OBE, winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road and one of the world’s best story tellers, reflects on his work and the challenges facing story tellers in the 21st Century.

Poet and novelist Ben Okri was born in Minna, northern Nigeria, to an Igbo mother and Urhobo father and is now considered one of Africa’s leading writers. Much of...

Short Story Masterclass with Courttia Newland

Part of Plymouth International Book Festival

Have you ever wanted to write your own short story? Develop your skills and understanding of this increasingly popular form from one of this country’s most original storytellers, Courttia Newland, in this Short Story Masterclass.

Courttia co-edited the anthology IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, and his short stories have featured in many other anthologies including The Time Out Book of London Short Stories: Vol 2, England Calling:24 Stories for the 21st Century and Disco 2000.

£10...

The Unbuilt Room

The Unbuilt Room is a performance game exploring how places create memories… and how memories create places. Small groups of players wander through rooms real and imagined in a collaborative act of memory to create imagined, immersive theatre.

Versions of The Unbuilt Room have been performed at the Science Museum, Turner Contemporary, The Royal Geographical Society, Hastings Museum, Royal Holloway University, Stratford Circus... and a houseboat in Shoreham-by-Sea.

Artist and Producer Seth Kriebel’s work is characterised by short, interactive pieces for small audiences....

Take Me I’m Yours Opera: Beyond the Supermarkets

Part of Plymouth International Book Festival

We like to think that we, the humans, are in control of the inanimate objects around us—cereal boxes, sugar cubes, printer paper. What happens, though, when objects start talking back, telling us what to do?

This unique interactive performance draws on research by Chris Speed and Duncan Shingleton into object-agency, using an IPhone App that lets objects instruct their users rather than the other way around.

This performance is taking place as part of The Expanded Narrative Symposium

Kate Mosse: The Mistletoe Bride & Other Winter Tales

Part of Plymouth International Book Festival

Kate Mosse, author of the bestselling novel Labyrinth, will be reading and discussing her first ever collection of stories, The Mistletoe Bride & Other Winter Tales.

Kate is the author of the multi-million selling international No.1 Languedoc Trilogy. Translated into 37 languages and published in 40 countries, the first of the series, Labyrinth, was the bestselling book in the UK in 2006, named as one of Waterstones’ best novels of the past 25 years and was made into a feature film for Channel 4 television...

Live & Loud 1: Lemn Sissay

Part of Plymouth International Book Festival

Join poet and playwright Lemn Sissay for an evening of passion and poetry.

Lemn Sissay, MBE, is associate artist at the Southbank Centre, Europe’s largest arts complex. He was the first poet commissioned to write for the 2012 Olympics and his poem Spark Catchers is etched into a transformer on the Olympic site.

In 2008 he travelled to the Arctic with Jarvis Cocker, Laurie Anderson, Martha Wainwright and KT Tunstall to inspire them to respond to climate change within their work.

His play...

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