No Substitute for the book - Nadine Gordimer - Hay Festival

Nadine Gordimer advocates book over screen for the imagination - and Africa

Nobel laureate defends printed word and calls for libraries in shanty towns in Hamlin lecture at Guardian Hay festival

• Charlotte Higgins
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 30 May 2010 23.13 BST

Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer speaking at the Hay festival. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, one of South Africa's most distinguished literary figures and a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, has mounted a passionate defence of the printed book against the onslaught of technology.

In the week that the iPad was launched in the UK, Gordimer said: "There is no substitute for the book, and it would be a great deprivation and danger if the book should disappear and be replaced by something with a battery."

She said of mobile phone and computer technology: "I am not talking in a fuddy-duddy way about this. These things are wonderful for disseminating information.

"But for poetry, for novels, stories – those things that have the imagination at their heart – there is no substitute for the book."

full article --

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/30/nadime-gordimer-hay-hamelin-books

UK Book Festival --at Hay

see full article at---
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2010/may/29/guardian-hay-festival-quentin-blake

Quentin Blake's pen portraits of Hay festival booklovers

As the Hay festival gets into its stride, we asked artist, illustrator and former children's laureate Quentin Blake to turn his eye to booklovers out and about at the festival. Watch him drawing portraits of people doing that strangest and most intimate thing of all – reading

Sydney Writers' Festival Non-Fiction- contemporary key issues from food to health care to dangerous everyday things to cosmic war.

Check out this list of program topics for the Sydney Writers' Festival---

http://www.swf.org.au/component/option,com_events/Itemid,176/task,view_strand/

The 2010 SWF had a particular emphasis on non-fiction highlighted by the opening address given by Rezee Aslan (How to Win a Cosmic War; No God but God) a leading commentator on Iran and the US War on Terror. If you cast about in the program there are many writers who have recently produced books on all sorts of key contemporary issues. Lionel Shriver - the working of the US healthcare system (So Much for that- a novel) ; Michael Otterman - US Torture - Erasing Iraq ; Bill McKibben - climate change (Eaarth); Raj Pavel - our financial system and food - (The Value of Nothing); Bruce Laurie - the danger of everyday things (Slow Death by Rubber Duck : The Secret Danger of Everyday Things) -- and much more.

The Guardian Hay Festival

http://www.hayfestival.com/wales/gallery.aspx?skinid=2&localesetting=en-GB&resetfilters=true

Hay Festival is a gathering in the staggering beauty of the Brecon Beacons National Park.

Writers, comedians and musicians that have the capacity to change our lives, to share new visions of the world, and to do that incredibly sexy thing – to renew our sense of wonder.

An event to check out even at this distance.

what the papers say

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• “Hay hoovers up the best writers published in the world. This has over the years, created a self-reinforcing phenomenon: they get the best, and so the best want to come.”
  The Guardian
• “The small market town of Hay is an unlikely setting for one of the world’s biggest book festivals... a literary extravaganza that is now firmly established as the biggest book event in Britain... In fact it is the unlikeliness of the location that makes the festival so glorious”
  Los Angeles Times
• “The programme of events has become a smorgasbord of heterogeneity, a mixumgatherum of creativity and gravitas... an excellent festival.”
  The Independent
• “Hay platforms a genuine and earnest literary appreciation, offers real news, and opens its doors to real people. Writers were conversant, talks intimate, and readers and authors alike felt part of a vast, vocal and increasingly powerful literary community. Words in this border town pushed boundaries and opened up a dialogue that will keep us talking for years.”
  The National, UAE
• “Since 1988 the event has become an essential feature of the cultural calendar... unmissable for authors, publishers, and other assorted literary types.”
  The Independent

Sydney Writers Festival - many excellent events - this week

click image to enlarge.




Sydney Writers Festival TV commercial
Created by Saatchi Design



http://www.swf.org.au/
Check out their website for full details.

Colm Toibin interview in SMH by --

The Interview: Colm Toibin

MALCOLM KNOX

May 15, 2010

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-interview-colm-toibin-20100514-v3m4.html

A few words from this interview - concerning Eilis the heroine of Brooklyn his latest much acclaimed book-- which is in our library - the whole interview is available at this link and Colm Toibin is a guest at the Sydney Writers Festival this week. http://www.swf.org.au/

''Eilis is someone who by her nature is a second daughter,'' Toibin says. ''She's not brave, and has always had everything important done for her. Everything about her is withheld. She is holding her breath, as if she's afraid that by breathing out she'll offend somebody.''

He calls her a character in a ''minor key'', not a traditional heroine but ''similar to Catherine Sloper in Washington Square and Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, the ones who are well-mannered, shy, hard-working, careful of what they say''.

One of his readers reacted to Eilis's passivity by saying, ''I would like to wring her neck.''

''I can see that reaction,'' Toibin says, ''because Eilis is different from the big Irish girl with five boyfriends. She's so isolated and solitary. But that was the person who ended up emigrating and becoming everybody's mother.''

From the Sydney Writers Festival Program - see the program for more detail-

http://www.swf.org.au/component/option,com_events/Itemid,124/agid,1880/task,view_detail/

click on image to enlarge

Participants
Colm Tóibín, Caroline Baum (facilitator)

When
Friday, May 21 2010
20:00 - 21:00

Where
City Recital Hall
Angel Place
Sydney