Criminal activities by Tracy Darnton

 As last month's blog (read here) was about the return of YALC, this month is a look at my first trip to Harrogate for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. 

Yes, I have travelled to the dark side with the grown ups. And it was good. 

I loved:

The festival feel. The event tents and bar are set up in the grounds of the Old Swan Hotel, famous as the place Agatha Christie checked into when the whole country was worried about her disappearance. I'm a sucker for outdoor fairy lights and the whole place looked great. 

Relaxation zone

Who doesn't want to lounge in a deckchair reading a book?

The whole town enters into the spirit of it.

including fabulous local Imagined Things Bookshop 

and Oxfam

Waterstones at the festival sells all the guest author books and hosts signings. 

The vibe set by the festival chair Denise Mina and the sponsor director Simon Theakston was warm and friendly. The panels were stacked with interesting people and there were in-depth interviews with mega stars like Tess Gerritsen.  I see why crime fans go back year after year. 

I'd been worried that the late night quiz would be cliquey and way too difficult but it was entertainingly hosted by Val McDermid and Mark Billingham and our little team did pretty well. (Still kicking myself that I couldn't remember what type of dog Snowy is (Tintin's sidekick). 

Aside from the pride of seeing my talented friend Emma Styles on the New Blood panel chaired by Val McDermid, the stand out session for me was Lynda La Plante interviewed by Denise Mina. If ever you get the chance to see her, grab it. 

We had an accommodation package 

and everything was included in the Rover Ticket without the hassle of booking individual events. 

The freebies! Got to love a tote bag stacked with books for starters. By the end I had too many to drag home on the train. 

Engaging promotions. Publishers with money to spend on their promotional activities (Yes!!!)

eg Escape Room experience, book themed cocktails with Charlie Higson, afternoon tea with Katy Watson and Rosemary Shrager, red rose which was the key to a book giveaway, proofs and samplers galore. 

Escape room corner in the The Crime Vault

BUT

It was pricey! 

The hotels had seen better days.

The food at the Murder Mystery Evening was dire. 

Coming so soon after YALC, I definitely missed the diverse/younger audience and authors. 

Too much queuing in the drizzle to get into the events tent.

Finally, in my humble opinion, it needs a YA thriller panel.

So cliffhanger moment... Will I go back? 

I'm dying to. 

Tracy Darnton is the author of YA thrillers The Truth About Lies, The Rules and most recently Ready or Not. She's still ploughing through the pile of thrillers she picked up in Harrogate. 

The Marvellous Mabinogi by Claire Fayers

 

This month saw the return of my favourite book festival. It happens in the little South Wales town of Pontypridd, a few miles from Cardiff. 

The Ponty Kids Bookfest began when organisers, Jeff and Cerith, realised that local children had very little access to books outside of school, and they decided to do something about it.

There are many reasons I love the festival.

1. They pay the authors, In these days of discussions over author pay, it's refreshing to find a festival that made the decision to pay a fee right from the start.

2. They always have a great programme, mixing local authors with bigger names. (This year we had Matt Brown, Tracy Darnton and Eloise Williams amongst others.)

3. There is cake! Carol the Cake (not her real name, though it should be) always brings a selection, tailored to the authors' specific requirements. 

4. The knock-on effects - these have been huge.

The festival's success has led to the organisers launching a bookshop in the town and it's done so well they have plans to expand. The combination of the bookshop and the refurbished library means that access to books has never been better.

And now, in 2022, stories have leaped out of bookshop and library onto the streets. To celebrate the publication of The Mab, a new retelling of the ancient Welsh stories of The Mabinogi, the town council sponsored a story trail. Visit Pontypridd and you'll find eleven permanent story stones, each stone representing a different story and featuring Max Low's artwork from The Mab.

Stone from The Amazing Eight by Hanna Issa

Stone from Peredur, the Monster, and the Serpent of the Cairn by Darren Chetty

Author PG Bell with his stone, Geraint, Enid and the Big Knight Fight

I was lucky enough to lead tours around part of the trail during the festival. The stones are beautifully tactile and children are encouraged to take rubbings and make up their own stories as they explore.

My own stone is The Strange and Spectacular Dream of Rhonabwy the Restless, which you'll find on Pontypridd common. 

You can find out more about the trail here. If you're in the area, take time to have a walk around and immerse yourself in tales of bandits and knights, heroic queens and murderous flowers. It's a tremendous way to celebrate the enduring power of stories.

Claire Fayers

www.clairefayers.com

Your invitation to a Halloween festival - by Holly Race

The last eighteen months has given us precious little enjoyment: stuck in our homes, worrying about shortages and vaccines. One of the few things that I have treasured is the greater accessibility of events as everything moved online. For anyone outside the London bubble or with access needs, this has always been a problem, and it's a real shame that it's taken a pandemic to force the wider publishing world to address this.

So as we slowly begin to return to 'in-person' events I really hope that we don't lose sight of how inclusive online events can be, and how important it is to retain that if we want to foster a diverse industry. As one of the founders of a growing community of UK and Ireland-based YA authors, we are hoping to help contribute to this, starting with Killer YA Con, which starts today and ends on Halloween.

Organised largely by horror authors Kat Ellis and Amy McCaw and contemporary author Naomi Gibson, Killer YA Con is a week-long festival of panels, readings and giveaways around spooky or Halloween-related YA novels. Do have a look at the schedule and join us, if you'd like to share our love of YA with a bite!

---

Holly Race worked for many years as a script editor in film and television, before becoming a writer.

Her YA urban fantasies, Midnight's Twins and A Gathering Midnight, are published by Hot Key Books.

www.hollyrace.com

Making Hay, by Sophia Bennett

Last week I had the wonderful experience of being invited to speak at Hay. It's my third visit, and each one is special in its own way. 

This time, the specialness started as we pulled up at our B&B, where we were met by the curious chickens. They came to check us out every time. Not sure we passed the first inspection. 

 This, I kid you not, was our bath.

But it wasn't just about the creature comforts. There were also books to be discussed, in a big tent (actually lots of big tents), in a field (probably lots of fields - but hard to tell, under the tents) in a village on the border between England and Wales, and most definitely heaven. 

Talking of which, the first talk I went to was by Ben Lewis, talking to Kirsty Lang, and was all about Jesus. Or rather, Leonardo da Vinci's painting of him in the Salvator Mundi. Or WAS it Da Vinci? That's what Ben's book is about. By the end we all agreed that nobody really knows, but it's probably about 20% da Vinci. Great hand, though. A hand by the hand of the master, probably. Great talk.

And the following day (after we'd tried out the bath), we were back in a big tent with Kirsty again, who was talking to Horatio Clare this time about a walk he did in Germany, in the footsteps of JS Bach. If you ever get the chance to listen to Horatio, do. (He's on Radio 3, so not hard to find.) He has a voice for broadcasting, a beautiful turn of phrase, innate hope about the natural world, and always something interesting to say. As an audience, we were gripped. Afterwards, Horatio signed for nearly two hours. (I bought 2 copies of 'Something of His Art'. Check out the gorgeous cover on the link.)

And then there was the Artists' Room, where we were treated like royalty. I didn't spot any actual royalty (although it's been known), but did see Michael Gove, Jeanette Winterson, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris (who kindly signed my copy of 'The Lost Words' for me and let me fangirl) and many other Famous Faces. My husband and I had a lovely long chat with Candy Gourlay, who's produced all sorts of content from Hay this year - so if you want to know the full story, follow her on Twitter, her website and wherever else you can find her!

And then it was time to watch Frank Cottrell-Boyce in conversation with Lauren Child. I love to hear about writers and illustrators' artistic process. Lauren said that often a book will take her years to write, putting it away when she gets stuck and coming back to it later when the ideas flow again. She's lost count of how many she's done, so it's obviously working for her. It was fascinating to hear about the way she does collage too - so painstaking. You'd think perhaps it's all digitised now, but it isn't. A lot of the patterns she uses come from the insides of Australian envelopes. So now you know.

I was going to be speaking in the same tent as Frank and Lauren, and it was big! Lots of people! This was my view from halfway back in the audience. I assumed there would be about 20 people for mine, but actually it was pretty full too. Which shows that 1) Hay audiences have great taste and want to know about women in the art world and 2) the great Hay festival organisers are brilliant at getting people enthused. Hooray! (These are my books in the bookshop by the way.)

The sun shone. Not all the time, but enough. Make Hay and all that ...

And then it was time for my event with Claire Armitstead from the Guardian. She was a brilliant, gentle, thoughtful, (prepared!), funny chair. She let me do my thing, talking about some of my favourite artists from 'The Bigger Picture: Women Who Changed the Art World' and what I find fascinating about their lives and work. Claire ended with the quiz from the back of the book - asking the audience some hand-picked questions, which they could now cheerfully answer! Candy was in the audience and took these pictures. Thanks Candy! (My husband was there too but he was too busy cheering - very loudly and embarrassingly - to take a photo.) 

Here he is afterwards. Still cheery. 

And then it was party time. Again, no pictures from husband, so resorting to a selfie to give the general idea.

And this is what it looked like when we got there. I say 'we' - I was sharing the B&B with Jessie Burton, as you do, and we went together. She was LOVELY, and obligingly signed my copy of 'The Restless Girls' after breakfast the next day. If you want a feminist fairytale for older girls, with magnificent illustrations by Angela Barrett, then this is the one. It is odd but nice to share toast and marmalade with your literary heroes. At Hay, that's the sort of thing that happens.

 Home time. Such a beautiful view from the Second Severn Crossing. And a memento: the very last 2017 30th anniversary Hay mug, by Emma Bridgewater, with a fantastic image of Hay by her husband, Matthew Rice. Guess what I'm drinking my tea out of as I write ... 

Sophia Bennett

New Kid on the Block

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending a new children’s literary festival – The Broughton Hall Children’s Literature Festival. It was unlike any festival I’ve appeared at before. 

It was held over two days in seven marquees erected in the grounds of Broughton Hall and there were a number of things that made it different and special.

The main thing was the sense of community that existed around the festival. All of the authors, illustrators, poets and storytellers stayed in or around the Hall itself. Normally we performers only get to pass fleetingly in a green room as we are whisked off to perform, at this festival we ate together in pubs, socialised at each other’s events and even enjoyed a gala dinner together on the Saturday night. It meant we got to reaffirm old friendships and make new ones along the way. 

Names I only knew from jacket sleeves became people to share a beer with and more importantly we got to see each other perform, learning from each other and being inspired by some of the best in the business. The fact that this was a weekend festival meant that most authors were performing twice. As a consequence, after your first event you were hanging around, soaking up the creative atmosphere rather than having dinner with a publisher or PR before being bundled onto a train.

Speaking of which, perhaps it was because the festival was so far from London -  Skipton in Yorkshire – but none of the performers had the usual entourage of PRs and publicists in tow. I know we’re an approachable lot, but there’s something about a professional with a clipboard flanking your shoulder that says ‘keep your distance’ even if you’d love to stop chat.

For me it was refreshing. This can be a lonely business. Normally we only get to meet each other at festivals and on panels and even then it can often be on quite a surface level. Here I got to speak to people I’d admired for some time and it felt like I was part of a community, we were people who valued the same things, had the same professional issues and often fought the same fights!

For that reason it felt like the festival was more than just a chance for us to meet our public. It was a chance for us to meet each other and that doesn't happen often enough. 

Another biggie – and this can’t be over stated – is I also got to sleep in a stately home for three nights. As far as perks go, this was amazing. Broughton Hall is beautiful. It’s used as a film location and it usually costs £32,000 per night to rent the place. To be given the run of it with my fellow authors was wonderful! Sitting drinking whisky in a book lined drawing room chatting the night away while a fire roared in the hearth was something I’ll remember fondly for a long time.

Trevor and the team at Authors Abroad had never run a festival before, and while there are things I am sure they might do differently next time, they were happy to break the rules - perhaps because they didn’t know what the rules were in the first place! And it was great to have those rules broken. It cut through a lot of barriers.

It was refreshing to be at a family festival run by a genuine family -  not just Trevor’s immediate family who literally brewed us tea and made us sandwiches – but the extended family of his friends, helpers and employees. Perhaps it was this that made us individual, ambitious authors feel, for a glorious weekend, like one big happy family too.

Find out more - https://childrensliteraturefestival.org/