The Country Wife

This, Wycherley’s third play, was written in 1675, 15 years into the reign of Charles II ‘The Merrie Monarch’, who was the first to permit women to to be played by women – they had previously been played by boys. From 1753 to 1924, the play was not performed though an emasculated version “The Country Girl”, by David Garrick, was.

The play has 3 plots. 1) Horners impotence trick; 2) The Pinchwife/Margery Pinchwife story, based on Moliere’s ‘School for Wives’; 3) The Harcourt/Alithea story. The theme of ‘the battle of the sexes’, and the associated sex jokes, are central to Renaissance comedy of the 1670s-1680s.

The character of Harry Horner is  derived from Don Juan, via Tirso de Molina’s'Trickster of Seville’ from 1630 and Moliere’s ‘Dom Juan, ou Le Festinne de Pierre’ of 1665. Like Don Juan, Harry Horner is isolated, with no real relationships, and no meaningful action other than repeated seduction. Like Don Juan, he is hostile to women, frequently comparing them to whores which he ‘proves’ by seducing them. His neurotic view of the world is revealed in the opening sentence: “A quack is as fit for a pimp as a midwife for a bawd; they are still but in their way helpers of nature” For him, human nature is corrupt, similarly to Jonson’s Volpone or Mosca. Pinchwife sums it up “he would but ruin you, as he has done hundreds. He has no love for women but that; such as he look upon women, like basilisks, but to destry ‘em.” In the same scene Horner compares ‘sweet, soft, gentle,tame and noble ‘women to ‘sweet, soft, gentle, tame and more noble’ spaniels. His view of women is encapsulated nn Act iii, where Horner says “’tis since I can’t love ‘em, to be avenged on ‘em”

Why does Horner hate women? Maybe Oedipus complex, seeking his mother in all women but failing to find her. Or maybe latent homosexuality: this could be seen in his fake impotency  as a rejection of women, in his “good fellowship and friendship are lasting, rational, and manly pleasures”, in his inability to find gratification in repeated sexual conquests of women, and in his repeated kissing and fondling of Mrs Pinchwife when she is disguised as a boy.

Despite all this, Horner also wittily exposes the hypocrisy around him, and is spared punishment at the end of the play.

Pinchwife too is hostile, and neurotically jealous. He locks Mrs Pinchwife in her room, draws his sword to threaten her twice, and threatens to both write ‘whore’ on her face and cut out her eyes with a penknife. Pinchwife is threatened by Mrs Pinchwife’s sexuality, to the extent that he dresses her as a male to circumvent that threat. Mr Pinchwife could also be seen as a caricature of the Puritanism of the Cromwell years.

Margery Pinchwife herself is a parallel of Harry Horner – unable to form normal relations with men, because of her husbands jealousy.

The ‘pinch’ of Pinchwife could, in a modern sense, refer to holding as in ‘pinchpenny’ and be connected to his holding Margery in her room. In the 17th century it was also a form of tortue involving red-hot tongs, as in Shakespeare’s Caliban fearing ‘pinching’ as a punishment.

Sparkish is Pinchwife’s opposite, who is very negligent of his fiance Alithea. Sparkish is obessesed with ‘wit’, in the same way that Pinchwife is obsessed with being cuckolded and Horner is obsessed with cuckolding. Sparkish is out of touch with reality. He sees Harcourt as a fictive fellow wit, blind to the reality that Harcourt is trying to take his bride.

Alithea and Harcourt represent reasonable people, thus acting as a foil to Horner. Harcourt is the only person to trust Alithea’s innocence when everybody else believes she is having an affair with Horner.

The bawdiness of Restoration comedy is not a reflection of society as a whole. Drawing on Bergson, in his essay “Laughter: an essay into the meaning of the comic” he points out the moral aspect of comedy, in which laughing at vices encourages suppression of those vices. Hence, laughing at bawdiness and overt sexuality in restoration comedy is helping to suppress it in society. Bergson also identifies social rigidity and repetition as a source of comedy. This is why Horner, Pinchwife, and Sparkish are comic. They are socially rigid, repeating the same obsessions with cuckoldry, seduction, and wit respectively.

The play is polysemous. If Horner is taken to be the flawed hero, the play is attacking the hypocrisy of false marital faithlessness such as Lady Fidget’s. If Alithia and Harcourt are taken as the only admirable image of love in the play, then Horner, both Pinchwifes, and all the Fidgets are dismissed morally.

My Last Duchess

This, one of Browning’s more sinister poems, was written in 1842 and is loosely based on the 16th Century historic Duke of Ferrara, whose first wife died suspiciously after 2 years of marriage. It also has similarities to Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ that was published in the same year. Both feature a portrait of a young woman, who died in suspicious circumstances, and raise the issue of women being decorative objects.

The dramatic monologue is very suitable for this poem as the Duke is very controlling. He is jealous that he could not monopolise the Duchesses smiles, and instructs the listener to sit, rise, and go down. Brownings choice to use dramatic monologue allows character, strength of will, and intellect to eclipse moral correctness and moral argument, as by it’s nature only the narrator gets a say, so he can dictate what is said and use persuasive rhetoric. The use of heroic rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter with enjambment adds to the authoritarian tone of the Duke. Brownings monologue narrators, for that reason, are often aggressive, sometimes threatening, and always intellectually and/or socially superior to their listener. Typically they are also very eloquent though rarely honest. The world created by the narrators words may not be valid, and may be rejected by the auditor or reader.

As well as being a poem, this is also a performance by the Duke who seats his audience, unveils the show, and provides a rhetorical speech. There is a challenge in this speech, a veiled hostility towards the auditor (or reader), in that they are pressured into not challenging the Dukes version of events.This introduces a metapoetic element to it – the poem is in part about itself.

With this element of the audience in it, though called a monologue, this is in a sense a dialogue. The Duke is speaking not to us the readers, but to an invisible, silent, listener. Though silent, the presence of this listener is essential, as is the listeners’s silence which itself is communication constructed through silence.  It can be a silence through intimidation, or a silence through acceptance, and the reader is invited to make the same judgement. Through this silent listener, and our voyeuristic observation of the Duke’s show, Browning builds tension between sympathy and moral judgement.

The portrait of the duchess is another presence. It has all the desirable qualities that made her a Duchess, but none of the ones the Duke complains about, such as “a heart too soon made glad”. Now the portrait is behind a curtain that only the Duke can put by, allowing him to control who the Duchess smiles for. He sees his wife as a possession, emphasised in the final lines where the listener is invited to notice a statue of Neptune, in much the same way as being invited to notice the Duchess.

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

Written 1842, this is a very entertaining and humorous poem yet, like all of Robert Brownings work, it deserves a closer look to see what lies beneath the light-hearted skin.

The unremarkable form is nine stanzas of eight lines each, and roughly tetrameter with an  ABABCDCD rhyme scheme. The only thing that looks out of the ordinary at first glance is the colloquial language, the G-R-R-R in the first and last lines, and the mysterious Hy, Zy, Hine.

The content explores hypocrisy, evident from the first stanza: “if hate killed men, Brother Lawrence/Gods blood, would not mine kill you!” However, doubt’s about the speakers honesty appear in stanza 4, where he implies that Brother Lawrence lusts after nuns as they wash their hair: “I see his dead eye glow”, followed by, in parenthesis, “that is, if he’d let it show!”.  This suggests that the ‘dead eye glow’ is imaginary, that there is no real evidence to support the accusation, and the detail with which “brown Dolores” and Sanchicha are described – he knows their names, and where they go, and notes that their blue-black tresses are lustrous – tells us that he, in fact, is watching them with interest inappropriate for a monk. The later appearance of  his “…scrofulous French novel/On grey paper with blunt type!” is a further indication of this.

On top of this apparent lustiness, pedantry is on display, with  Brother Lawrence being condemned for not crossing his knife and fork in remembrance of Jesus’ mortal death, and for draining his glass in one gulp, instead of the three gulps needed to show his faith in the trinity. This suggests that for our speaker, such little displays count for more than genuine faith.

Despite the appearances of confidence, self-doubts show as he describes Brother Lawrence as being “sure of heaven as sure can be”, implying that the narrator knows that Brother Lawrence is virtuous. As the speaker hatches a plan to plant the scrofulous French novel on Brother Lawrence, or even to trick Satan by pledging his soul but “…leave Such a flaw in the indenture/As he’d miss…” it becomes clear that he is, in fact, envious of Brother Lawrence’s piety.

Looking deeper, though it is named as a soliloquy,  it is is not clear what it actually is. It is not a genuine soliloquy, as it is a free standing poem rather than part of a play. Nor is it a dramatic monologue, as a monologue has at least two characters – a speaker  and an audience – while our monk is speaking to himself.  It does, though, have several notable features of Browning’s monologues: sketching the narrators character; aestheticising details; an implied lesson in morality that proves false.

The most intriguing mystery is the Hy, Zy, Hine in line 70, whose meaning remains unknown. Suggestions, unsurprisingly,  are numerous. An early one is that they are the sound of Vespers bells interrupting the speakers thoughts, though it would be a very odd sound for a bell.

A later theory is that it is some kind of incantation, an extension of the speakers wishful thinking about satanic rites. The use of  upper-case initial letters  points to some sort of ritualistic element, and one suggested source for an incantation (suggested by Gordon Pitts) is  the parodistic French Medieval “Mass of the Asses” that has the refrain “Hez hez sire asnes hex”. Add a bit of slurring and presumably Browning being confused and this becomes Hy, Zy, Hine which, Pitts concludes, is being used by the malicious speaker to compare Brother Lawrence’s Vesper chant with the baying of an ass.  While  ”Mass of the Asses” would be known to educated Victorian gentlemen, the need to change every word is a serious objection. An alternative “Mass of the Asses” suggestion from Susan Hardy Aiken is that it is sourced from William Hone’s  1832 description in “Ancient Mysteries Described”, in which the refrain becomes “Huzza, Seignor Ass, Huzza!”. “Huzza” becomes “Hy, Zy” and “Hine” is the ” Hin-Han” ending of the mock mass interrupted by Browning’s ellipsis. This suffers similar issues to Pitts – every word is changed.

James F. Loucks argues against this, and suggest as an alternative  the conjuration of Mars in Peter of Abano’s Heptameron, or Elementa Magica. This conjuration contains the line “Rex regum, El, Atv, Titeip, Azia, Hvn, en, Minosel, Achadan, Vay, Vaa, Ey, Haa, Eye, Exe, a El, El, El, a, Hy,’Hau, Hau, Hau.Va, Va, Va, Va.”  Browning knew of Peter of Abano, as he was the subject of one of Brownings late poems, and we have the Hy and the Hyn, but there is no Zy. Loucks gets around that by suggesting that Browning changed Azia to Zy, so that it would rhyme with Hy.

James Anderson rejects all of these and proposes that they are Middle English colloquial words. Hy as an archaic spelling of “hie”, meaning “hurry”; Hine as an early “hind”, a menial character such as a slave or lout; and Zy from ‘sy’, ‘to sink’. The whole is hence “hurry, sink, lout”.  Why, in this theory, Browning would use capital letters,  how his audience would pick up on the humour, and why he would choose to use archaic, colloquial language, is unexplained.

So far, it is still a mystery, and perhaps always will be.

Waiting for Godot – Three Interpretations.

Waiting for Godot was written 1948, but not performed until 1953, on the 5th of January, in the Theatre de Babylone, Paris.  The play was originally written in French. This is significant, mainly as it works against the idea of Godot = God, and also as the inevitable loss in translation means that, although the play has been voted ”the most significant English language play of the 20th century” in a British Royal National Theatre poll, English speakers are not seeing the play in original form.

Godot was famously described as a the ‘…play in which nothing happens. Twice’.  This is true in a sense, but it is going against the genre.  This is a Modernist play, Theatre of the Absurd,   and commenting on a human situation rather than telling a story. Absurd in this sense is not ‘ridiculous’, but ‘out of harmony’ and refers to humans portrayed in the play, not to the play itself.

If the play  could be said to  be ‘about’ anything, it is about waiting. Waiting for Godot, who never shows.  Beckett’s constant refusal to say who Godot is makes the rest of us wait too. Like the characters, the audience too are waiting for Godot.

How long is the wait? It is impossible to say, as the portrayal  of time is quite arbitrary. Pozzo looks at his watch, to confirm that 60 years have passed.  The lonely tree grows leaves ‘overnight’. Pozzo says “have you done tormenting me with your accursed time?”  and  Vladimir asks “Tommorow, when I awake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?”

The play is clearly susceptible to a Christian interpretation.  The whole situation of waiting in faith has orthodox Christian overtones. The tree, the only thing on the stage, has an obvious connection to the Tree of Life.  When they believe Godot is approaching the response is “It’s Godot! We’re saved!”.  When Vladimir asks the second boy what Godot looks like, he has a white beard.  Estragon and Vladimir behave, on the whole, in a Christian way to each other, sharing food, and Vladimir puts his coat over sleeping Estragon. Estragon objects to the treatment of Lucky “To treat a man… like that [...]  It’s a scandal” The unkind Pozzo, after ill-treating Lucky, returns the day after, blinded. Lucky, whose ‘thinking’ contained nothing of God, is struck dumb. The first young boy describing how his brother is beaten by Godot, while he isn’t, parallels the two thieves crucified with Jesus. One is saved, one isn’t. If Vladimir and Estragon ‘drop’ Godot, they will be punished.

However, the opposite can be argued. The tail of the two thieves shows how one thief was *not* saved. Godot never actually appears – the waiting is in vain. The Tree of Life has very little life in it – a few leaves is the best it can do.  In this reading, it becomes significant that no sooner does Vladimir say “Tied to Godot? What an idea! No question of it.”  than Lucky appears, on a rope, followed at length by Pozzo. This does not suggest that Pozzo = Godot, but it is an allegory. Lucky is in that situation willingly – “He wants to impress me, so that I will keep him”, paralleling the situation of religious people being willingly tied to their god, and often suffering for it.

A third reading has Estragon representing Judaism. Beckett’s notes tell us that he was originally to have been called Levy, an obviously Jewish name, but this was changed to Estragon, perhaps after Tarragona, the  medieval ‘City of Jews’.  Vladimir is Christianity, perhaps after the first Russian ruler to convert to Christianity, Duke Vladimir of Kiev, and Pozzo is Fascism named for Duc Pozzo de Borgo, a militant pro-Fascist from the 1930s, with his ‘Lucky’ tame intellectual in tow.  In this reading, Estragon/Judaism is older. He struggles to get his boots on and off, forgets things, sleeps a lot, and frequently needs to sit down. He can remember maps of the dead sea – “It was pale blue” – and planned a honeymoon there.  He wants to move on – “I’m going!” – and gets beaten a lot. He suggests they would be better parted. Pozzo is fascism, with his ‘thinker’ Lucky who speaks nonsense, quoting Fartov.  He is full of importance in the first act:- “Do I look like a man who can be made to suffer?” He calls his tame thinker ‘Pig’, reflecting Fascist anti-intelectualism.  He loses both his watch and his pipe, a symbol of losing his comforts. In the second act, Pozzo has lost his sight and his power, and his tame intellectual has been silenced. In fact, they are lying on the floor. This is post war now, shown by the tree returning to life.  Despite that, post-war is very similar to pre-war. ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same’,  shown in the similarities between the two acts.  Judaism and Christianity are still waiting for their saviour, even after the horrors of war.

None of these readings can be said to be the ‘right’ one, as they are all equally valid. What we are seeing is the Modern characteristic of a text having no fixed meaning.

DSC South Asian Literature Festival Update.

Following up on the previously mentioned Literature Festival, the longlist of titles for the DSC Prize has been released:

1. Upamanyu Chatterjee: Way To Go (Penguin)
2. Amit Chaudhuri: The Immortals (Picador India)
3. Chandrahas Choudhury: Arzee the Dwarf (HarperCollins)
4. Musharraf Ali Farooqui: The Story of a Widow (Picador India)
5. Ru Freeman: A Disobedient Girl (Penguin/ Viking)
6. Anjum Hassan: Neti Neti (IndiaInk/ Roli Books)
7. Tania James: Atlas of Unknowns (Pocket Books)
8. Manju Kapur: The Immigrant (Faber & Faber)
9. HM Naqvi: Home Boy (HarperCollins)
10. Salma: The Hour Past Midnight (Zubaan, translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom)
11. Sankar: The Middleman (Penguin, translated by Arunava Sinha)
12. Ali Sethi: The Wish Maker (Penguin)
13. Jaspreet Singh: Chef (Bloomsbury)
14) Aatish Taseer: The Temple Goers (Picador India)

This list represents three languages – English, Tamil, and Bengali – and includes authors from the USA, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan. The short list will be announced in London on October 25th.

DSC South Asian Literature Festival

The  DSC South Asian Literature Festival, branded as Britain’s first major festival celebrating South Asian literature, is opening in London on the 15th of October, and lingering until the 25th. It will then tour the rest of the UK until the 31st, but this is to be confirmed. It is described on the website as:

Hundreds of ideas, meetings, pitches, theme debates, author names, venues, and book titles have been discussed for months on end and now they have boiled down to this: a tangible hold-it-in-my-hands full-colour preview programme. Excitement levels have increased several notches!

Tickets will be on sale via our website very shortly, but of the 17 main Festival events outlined in this neat little flyer (you can see the online version here), these are the ones at which you’ll have to fight me to get a front row seat.

There are 30 events lined up across London, and a list of celebraties including “Channel 4′s longstanding broadcast journalist Jon Snow, prized writer Romesh Gunesekera, author and musician Amit Chaudhuri and from Pakistan’s troubled political dynasty, Fatima Bhutto“ confirmed to appear.

For more information about this interesting event, click here.

More on E-books

I recently joined the ranks of ebook users, by purchasing an iRiver Story. At the time I had around 110Kg of luggage, thanks to a stash of books in my suitcases, and that probably had something to do with the decision.

This little device is not perfect, but it is a lot better than I expected. The screen is a thing called E-Ink, black print on a grey background with no back-light. If you have ever wondered if this is really that much better than an LCD screen, trust me – it is. So much better that the display on it’s own makes an e-book reader worth getting. It also tells the time and date, you can write a diary in it, and even play music or talking books. If you feel adventurous and techie you can install your favourite alternative fonts.

Reading is a pleasant enough experience. Depending on format you can adjust text size, the screen orientation can be either portrait or landscape, you can search the reader or the book, return to the contents page at any time, jump to any page, and add bookmarks to pages of interest. The downside is that page turns are a bit slow, referring to diagrams or illustrative text can be frustrating as there is no equivalent of an e-finger to stick in the e-page, and of course you can’t scribble in the margins if you are the book-defacing type that does that.

As for books themselves, it can read ePub, PDF, plain text, and MS Word, Excel, and PPT. PDF was a pleasant surprise, as any document can be saved as PDF. This means that just about any document can be saved and read on an iRiver Story. The books themselves are available from several sources. If you like classic literature, Project Guttenberg has loads of them available, free, as PDF or ePub documents.  So do Bartleby and Feedbooks, and if dubious legality is not an ethical barrier Gigapedia is just awesome. Alternatively, you can buy them from Amazon etc.

When you plug into your computer, iRiver Story appears as an external drive. Just drag and drop to load books. If you want software, iRiver have their own for Windoze  users to download, while Mac users get Calibre, and both can use Adobe Digital Editions.

The device comes with 2Gb of memory built in, and a card slot to add more. In my naivety I bought an 8Gb SD card to fill that slot, before discovering that the 2Gb installed is enough to hold 1,500-2,000 books.

In short, as a way of reading e-books, an iRiver Story is way ahead of reading on a laptop, but probably not as good as an old fashioned paper book and a bookcase doesn’t have quite the same impact with only a lonely iRiver Story on it. On the other hand I can’t think of an easy way to carry thousands of old fashioned paper books around, and in my circumstances the Story’s ability to carry and read a library is invaluable.

The Roaring Fish Guide to Successful Tweeting.

Hi everybody.  I am Roaring Fish and… I occasionally use Twitter.

I know, I really should use it more than occasionally as the whole point of Twitter is to announce to the world what you are doing. One reason for not using it much is that my life is not so exciting that I need to keep the world updated about it. A second is that 140 character limit. 140 characters is just not me!  However, as I am the Roaring Fish, I had to do something about it it so here, FoC, is The Roaring Fish Guide to Successful Tweeting.

• You don’t need “I am” at the beginning of every post. If you were in a conversation, and were asked what you where doing, you could answer “Writing a post about Tweets”, without the “I am”, so it is okay to Tweet that way too.
• Do use punctuation. Although it uses characters, it also helps people to understand what you are saying.
• Do use proper capitalisation. Whether you use uppercase or lowercase it is still one character, so using the latter when you should use the former is not saving anything, but it does come across as lazy.
• Do use contractions. Have not needs a space while haven’t doesn’t, thus saving one precious character.
• Do use  symbols. Shorthand symbols such as >, <, =, & (or +), and @ are okay as they save lots of characters. This is important when your message is < 140 characters.
• Do use numerals instead of words. Always.
• I suppose using short forms such as nite, tho, and thru can be tolerated, but only in desperate circumstances as they are so irritating.
• Don’t use abbreviations such as u, ur, 4, and L8. Apart from making you sound like an adolescent, it is also bad manners. Such abbreviations help the writer, but they do not help the reader. There may be an argument that they help the reader when they are using a tiny screen on a mobile phone, but they have no place in Twitter.
• Though not a character saving tactic, do provide links and context. Your loyal followers can’t see what, if anything, you are responding to.
• With that in mind, use tinyurl or similar to shorten links. A link can use up a significant number of characters all on it’s own.
• If you find that it is impossible to say it in under 140 characters, ask yourself whether you should be posting it on Twitter at all.

Beware the E-book March.

For the past century or so, publishers have enjoyed one key advantage that no one else could match. They could distribute. They could also design nice covers, edit pages, and do a good job of marketing books, but so can a lot of other people. What nobody else could do was the  nuts and bolts of distribution that puts books on bookshop shelves. That advantage, thanks to the creeping encroachment of the internet and  particularly online booksellers, is beginning to erode and could disappear altogether  if (or should it be when?) e-books become the primary source of an authors book revenue.

E-books now are around 5% of total book sales, so authors still need publishers to get their  books into the shops, but if e-book sales rise to 50% of the total, what then? E-books don’t require all that infrastructure of printers, warehousing, distribution systems, and shops. They require a only simple internet connection. Could an unknown, unpublished author do a deal with Amazon or Sony, upload their book and bam – instantly be as available as any best-seller today? In such a world, nobody really needs a publisher.

Perhaps.

Maybe.

Our e-author will still need copyediting, and editing, and a cover designer, and maybe help with deciding on which e-book vendor, and which format, and surely some marketing, and fiddly things such a placement on the very first page of an e-store. Going it alone is maybe not that easy, but what would definitely change is the power relationship between publisher and author. The author, for the maybe the first time in history, would have a choice of working with a publisher who would do all that dirty work, or do it themselves. The publisher in this scenario is reduced from a must-have to a nice-to-have; from a gatekeeper to a service provider. An author can’t realistically print, market, and distribute his own books but he could realistically design his own cover and decide which e-book vendor to approach, or at least get independent help with those matters.

Predicting the demise of publishers may be a bit extreme – an e-book is bit more than typing it out and clicking the upload button - but the publishers would have to be become delightfully author-friendly, driven by a need to win over authors choosing between dealing with a publisher or dealing with matters themselves. Maybe e-books are actually good for publishers.

The next question is, where is the profit in this? For the e-author the choice is DIY and no advance but more potential profits on the backend, or more traditional advance with less on the backend. For the publisher… well, it is no secret that Amazon take a loss on e-books to stimulate Kindle sales/market share, and the current $9.99 price point worries a lot of people. On the other hand, e-books sales growing from a 5% share to a 50% share is a huge increase in scale bringing with it associated economies.

This is all conditional on e-books becoming dominant, and that is a very big ‘if’, but things will definitely change.

Festival of Writing, York 2010

This event, being held at York University on 9-10 April 2010. The website tells us that:

This festival is for you, the writer. We know how hard it is to break into print, and the Festival is designed to give you everything you need to succeed.

The Festival has a host of workshops led by top authors on how to write – how to self-edit your work – how to approach agents – and much else.

We’ve also got numerous agents coming along to the event and you’ll be invited to pitch your work to them one-on-one.

We’ll also have loads of top editors, publishers and other industry experts. You’ll be listening to them, asking them questions – and have loads of opportunities for informal meetings too.

That already sounds useful for authors looking for that first break into print, and is given more credibility by being supported by the well-known Writers Workshop, who say:

We have over 80 professional authors, poets & screenwriters working for us, and we’ve helped dozens of clients go on to secure representation with top agents. We’ve even sold clients’ work direct to publishers – helping one lucky customer to a £21,000 advance.

The  HarperCollins Authonomy, a venture to get first-time writers into print, are also involved and so are Brit Writer Awards. Maybe more importantly for budding authors there are big-name publishers such as Barry Cunningham (J.K. Rowling)  and Genevieve Pegg (Meave Binchy) as well as big-name agents such as Darley Anederson and Simon Trewin. If that is intimidating, don’t worry – there are plenty of less intimidating but nonetheless very useful people – authors, editors, publishers, agents, book-doctors etc. –  to offer advice. If you want advice in a more formal manner there are workshops and mini-courses available.

It is not all workshops and keynote addresses though, Authonomy Live and  Literary Death Match provide entertainment, unless you choose to participate in which case they provide terror.

A interesting event, and held in the city of my childhood too. I can give my personal assurances that York is well worth visiting, festival or not!

Prices range from  GBP485, for a package including meals, accommodation, a mini-course, and 2 one-to-one slots with agents or editors, to  GBP150 for Sunday only, including meals, a workshop, and 2 one-to-one slots. The home page is here, you can take in the highlights at a glance here, and check out the programme here. Early booking is recommended as it is filling up fast.