Guildford Book Festival

The Guildford Big Read is Well Under Way!

Guildford Book Festival launched an exciting new initiative for this year � The Guildford Big Read. Festival organisers chose novels by the much loved Guildford-born author P. G. Wodehouse for the Big Read.

"We were really eager to run an event which everyone could join and the timing for the launch was just perfect - eighteen of Wodehouse�s titles have just been re-issued by Arrow Books this summer and 2008 is also the National Year of Reading" explained Glenis Pycraft, Festival Director.

The launch took place at a very sunny Electric Theatre on Saturday 28 June. Many came to choose their free Wodehouse book, have a go at Pig Racing and celebrate with a cooling Pimm�s and lemonade as they enjoyed music courtesy of the brilliantly talented singers from Guildford School of Acting.

The highlights of the event were personal appearances by one of Britain�s favourite actresses Prunella Scales, who launched the event by cutting a specially designed �Wodehouse� cake, and the much loved crime writer Simon Brett who hosted proceedings. Ms Scales, herself a great Wodehouse fan, was delighted that the Festival had chosen his works and was particularly excited by the prospect of new readers discovering him. Bestselling novelist Adele Parks, who is local to Guildford and also a Wodehouse fan, came to support the launch.

Schools and Young Readers

Hello and welcome to your very own special area of the site! If you love reading this is the place to find out what�s going on.

We�ve planned lots of exciting events with some of your favourite authors and you�ll have the chance to come and meet them on school visits. Some of you might even be lucky enough to have them visit your school!

If you would like your school to take part, please ask your teachers to email our Schools Co-ordinator Stephanie Heald.

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Short Story Competition 2007 - Runner-up

End of Summer By Mrs Chris Hazelgrove

Level with her travel stung eyes, the name plate gleamed: St Joseph�s Home for Orphans. She re-read it, knew the summer holiday was over, knew that the life she had always known was over.

There was no journey in her memory, and Lily could recall no packing up, no goodbyes to school friends or family at the gate, no overnight stay somewhere to make possible the long and difficult transfer she and her mother must have made.

�Well, here we are ,� her mother said, in that particular way she had of stating the obvious. She put down Lily�s tiny cardboard suitcase, and leaned more heavily on the wall of the porch.

A chill gust of wind flipped under the hem of Lily�s coat, finding her bare knees. A swirl of brown leaves chased, breaking formation against the brick red porch before whisking upwards and away.

One small leaf remained trapped in a cobweb, abandoned and flapping as its fellows soared and parted company.

That she had arrived here in Surrey from her seaside home in Lancashire dismayed the child, not least because she had taken the precaution of leaving her favourite pink-striped pebble in the church after Sunday school.

She had hummed to herself through weeks of round-the-table speculations by uncle, her teacher, the vicar and a social worker. She strove to close her ears to the unwelcome information, rejected their final decision.

But it had happened anyway; they were sending her away to this place.

The building was vast. Bigger than the rectory or Royal Albert Hotel, the facade loomed. Between the grizzled walls and cerulean sky a white clock tower showed slices of a huge grey bell.

She clutched her mother�s hand, before turning to look back. Lawns fell away for a distance even greater than the park near the sea front at home.

A fringe of trees formed a dense right angle where hobgoblins might live and where brown-gold leaves conspired to hide the road along which their bus must have travelled.

Four parallel white lines were just visible in the centre of the grass expanse. A memory, sudden and sharp, struck her as her nostrils evoked the fading summer, its whitened kneepads and linseed oil stoked onto cricket bats.

She recalled that blistering day her older brothers were called from the pavilion to stand with their heads bowed before their mother, how the players awaited their return to the game by tossing the ball from hand to hand, dabbing bats into the crease.

They wore black armbands their mother had made, later transferring them from their white shirt sleeves to khaki. Lily remembered too the sleepy-body smell of her sister in their shared bed and the family�s noisy tears on the day the great black car drove up.

One side of the grass square was bounded by rougher growth, now yellowing. Fresh-painted football posts stood sentinel at either end.

The child and her mother stood on the fourth side, at the top of two steep terraces. Lily imagined lying on her side and rolling down them, one after the other, reaching the cricket pitch in one go and then running - running for ever and ever.

Incipient tears pricked at the lining of her nose and stung her eyes. In this unfamiliar place she ached behind her face and in her throat. Her tummy churned in a confusion of pains she knew even omniscient grown-ups would not understand.

She wanted above all things to go home. She felt dwarfed, shrunken like Alice in Wonderland when she obeyed the label and drank the potion.

Aunts, who only occasionally visited, would frighten her, saying �My how you�ve grown. If you go on like this you�ll hit the ceiling.� Now the reverse was happening and she had dwindled in this vast landscape, outside this huge house that would never be home.

There was hardly a sound: no gulls careening, no rigging clattering, no voices even, though her mother had promised her lots of children to play with. There was no grown-up chatter like in the kitchen at home, no wireless, no shouts of anger.

She recalled bursts of laughter rising from the street outside at night. But here, over the swish of the wind in the branches, she heard only a brown bee that zinged as it batted at the powdery mortar gripping chunks of flint in the wall.

The glossy green paint of the doors had been sun-blistered into crisp domes. Lily�s fore-finger itched to press them and feel those bulges burst, as she had burst the tar bubbles on the sun-baked road at home.

A shining brass disc set into the flints had a tempting centre of white porcelain with the word press in firm black letters. Focusing on the bell push to prevent the fall of welling tears, she said, �Do you think we should ring it?�

�Perhaps we�ll just knock�, her mother replied, as though that were a more modest, more acceptable method of attracting attention. Mrs Dyson stretched out her hand to the black iron stirrup on the door, but her gesture coincided with the movement of Lily�s finger, as, Alice-like, she obeyed the white button�s instruction and pressed.

Along with the crack of the knocker sounding against its plate, the bright chime of a bell echoed inside the house. A rumble of metal followed, as a bolt slid from its housing.

The doors parted and between them a lady with cheeks of spreading redness smiled down. She held onto the knobs, one in each hand, and bent her head forward, assessing.

Lily grabbed a fistful of black serge coat, remembering now who this stranger must be, and why they were here. She saw that her mother had paled and watched her lips flutter with words reluctant to leave her mouth, watched her tongue flick in and out. She loosened Lily�s grip and straightened up, pushing her little suitcase over the threshold with the end of one crutch.

�I�m Edna Dyson, and this is Lily,� her mother said, nudging the child forward.

The lady�s hand was a soft, warm weight on Lily�s shoulder. When the matron began to guide her through the double doors she looked round for reassurance.

But her mother had turned away and Lily only saw her hunched back retreating, and heard only the uneven crunch and scrape of her crutch as she shuffled away down the gravel path.

Short Story Competition 2007 - Winner

Openings and Endgame By Richard Cutler

People say Alitsa Krasnovaya is the worst street in Moscow. It is in the 12th District and is no more than an alleyway overhung by drab buildings. It runs from an exit of the Locomotiv ground to the Bulganin Cemetery. Never swept.

Football fans urinate in it, there are frequent knifings, murders, robberies and rapes. At night it is lit only by a single street lamp. Yet, surprisingly, it has a redeeming feature, No 24 - a house wedged in between two shabby tenement blocks.

More than a house, it has a fine garden running down to the cemetery itself, and once had been lived in by a cultured family and their son, a doctor. Sumner and winter the shutters were closed, blinds down - no one entering or leaving - no visitors, no police, no-one official � not even a cat being put out, or a dog let in.

24 was the house of a non-person, Streltsky, a man who had once received a Stalin Star, a brave doctor and surgeon on the front line of the People�s War against Fascism. That was until he was convicted of cowardice. He was not shot but was sent back to Moscow in a cattle truck with other criminals.

His trial before General Maximov and two tribunal comrades was swift. Streltsky was stripped of his university degrees and declared a non-person - no name. A number � 242424. His house number in triplicate - General Maximov�s joke

Forty years alone - his wife and family had left him. Who could live with a nobody? A divorce, for the doctor was no more, officially dead. These are facts. I looked after many such files for the KGB. The rest comes from sources I cannot reveal.

I protected his house by making it a non-place. I was taught by his father - he does not know me. During these decades of withdrawal Streltsky devoted himself to reading, not great Russian works though his lather had taught literature once at Kharkov University, but chess.

He followed all the great tournaments, televised and in the press, studied books on moves and tactics, knew the names of the chess correspondents by their first names and patronymics but they did not know he existed.

Online Ticketing

Once the 2008 Programme is announced, we will offer online ticketing for selected events at the Festival, via We Got Tickets.

Workshops 2007

Details of 2008's Workshops will appear here when confirmed.

Readers' Day
Sponsored by
Readers' Day will be held on Saturday 18 October 2008.

This year, Readers' Day will be hosted by Guy Pringle.

The participating authors are:

Emily Barr Amanda Brookfield Michael Dobbs

RJ Ellory Katie Fforde Ariana Franklin Jenni Mills

Michael Marshall Catherine O'Flynn Lesley Pearse Jane Wenham-Jones

What�s a Readers� Day?

A mini festival all in one day
A chance to share your enthusiasm for reading with others
Hear what authors read and who inspires them
Discover new ideas for your own reading
A chance to ask authors about their work

For further information contact Karen Weatherly.

2006 Festival

We were delighted so many high profile authors came to Guildford for the 2006 Festival. These included Maureen Lipman, Jeremy Paxman, William Dalrymple, Brenda Blethyn, Nicholas Evans, Claire Tomalin, Ian Rankin, Kevin McCloud, Hilary Mantel, Antonia Fraser, George Alagiah and Roger McGough to name but a few!

Audiences were enthusiastic, whether painting and glueing at The Big Draw, tasting Sophie Grigson�s cooking or swooning over Terry Wogan. A walk up Guildford High Street may have involved an encounter with James I or Tony Hillier, the community poet who, alongside a pirate, presented a pound for every poem written or read.

Festival patrons Fay Weldon and Sandi Toksvig showed their support. Sandi entertained children by creating an awareness of prejudice based on her latest children�s book and her event for adults kept the audience in hysterics.

Fay Weldon together with Pamela Norris discussed �What Women Want and What Makes Them Happy� (apart from chocolate!).

A first for the 2006 Festival was Readers� Day which saw eleven authors share inspiration for writing with their readers. It was a chance for readers to meet their favourite author and to discover new ones.

Play Writing Festival 2007

In association with Yvonne Arnaud Theatre


RJ Ellory	Katie Fforde	Ariana Franklin	Jenni Mills

Michael Marshall	Catherine O'Flynn	Lesley Pearse	Jane Wenham-Jones