Polygon Authors Open and Close Inaugral Festival

There hardly seems to be a town or city without a literary festival these days, but there is always room for one more! The latest is the Ayot Literary Festival, which will take place for the first time from Friday 24th to Sunday 26th June 2011 in the marquee on Ayot Green, near Welwyn Garden City. It’s a picturesque spot for a literary festival, complete with 18th century cottages clustered around a tranquil tree lined village green, and a charming acorn from which we hope a lovely huge oak will grow.   

Alexander McCall Smith

 

Jake Wallis Simons

 Two Polygon authors will be appearing at the festival, with Alexander McCall Smith being the first author to appear on the first day – a debut and a half! – to talk about the latest goings on at Corduroy Mansions in London’s slightly less picturesque Pimlico. And to neatly bookend what promises to be a wonderful weekend, Jake Wallis Simons will be the final author on the final day to read from and talk about his immensely moving novel, The English German Girl.

Tickets are now on sale, and more information on the festival can be found at http://www.greenfestivals.co.uk/.  

Borders Book Festival Programme Launched With a Birthday!

The Borders Book Festival might have a few more years to go to catch up on today’s Birthday Boy, Rory Bremner (a Patron of the Festival), but if it’s in as fine voice and as good shape as he is at 50 it will be doing very, very well.

Rory – with special guest appearances from Bill Clinton, Gordon Brown, Peter Snow and Michael Parkinson – helped launch the programme for the four-day, 65 event festival which kicks off on 16th June in Melrose in the Scottish Borders. And, as ever, Birlinn and Polygon will be there with bells on!

Polygon debut fiction author, Stuart Clark, will be taking us back to one of the darkest, yet one of the most enlightening, periods of European history when to say the earth revolved around the sun – as Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei did - was heresy and punishable by death in The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth. Stuart is a well-respected astronomer and science writer, so get along and see some stars.

Alexander McCall Smith will be bringing London’s Pimlico to Melrose with the latest collection of adventures at Corduroy Mansions A Conspiracy of Friends before taking us all to Botswana for Mma Ramotswe’s first adventure, Precious and the Monkeys.

And in three events, which the festival’s Director Alistair Moffat jokingly referred to as the ‘Dead Writers’ Society’, Robert Powell will be reading from and talking about John Buchan’s classic thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, and David Rintoul will be reading from and talking about Sunset Song and Dr Finlay’s Casebook.
And if all that wasn’t enough, the aforementioned Alistair Moffat will be taking the stage as an author this time to talk about The Scots: A Genetic Journey and his own, rather surprising, background.
So save the dates and get your tickets before they sell out!