Literary events are a wonderful way of discovering new authors, or authors you might have heard of but never got round to reading - and we're fortunate to have quite a few of these events in London.
On We
dnesday I went to
Literary Death Match at Shoreditch House. It was hosted by
Todd Zuniga and
Suzanne Azzopardi and featured
Esther Freud (author of seven novels including Lucky Break & Hideous Kinky), playwright/novelist/actress/friend of this blog
Julie Mayhew (Red Ink & Stopgap),
G S Mattu (Sons and Fascination) and Guy Folligrey who read from his new book and performed on the ukulele, and was judged the winner of the evening.
There was an anarchic feel to the evening as the readers competed for the attention of judges
Rowland Rivron,
Simon Hickson and
Sam Leith. Despite the competitive element, it's a very good-natured event - the judges were warm-hearted and witty, and anyway part of the performers' success depended on being able to catch marshmallows in their mouths, and shoot a lipsticked cupid's arrow as accurately as possible at a large photo of romance writer Barbara Cartland (bonus points if their arrow landed on her pug's snout in the photo). So none of the participants went away feeling that they had failed to win because their work lacked literary merit...
O
n Friday evening I went to Polari, a literary event held monthly at the Royal Festival Hall in London, hosted by
Paul Burston.
The readers were
Christopher Fowler,
Mark Gevisser, Paul Harding,
Lois Walden and
Rebecca Chance. Check out Chris's fascinating
blog, if you haven't come across it already - he uses London as a backdrop for his novels and often mentions interesting reference books he has collected on London, as well as other books he has read, films and exhibitions he has seen, and so on.
Chris and Mark read autobiographical extracts. Chris talked about how he got his start in advertising in the 1970s before going on to write fiction, including scripts and novels. Mark's moving excerpt was taken from Edenvale (which is published in
Aliens, the new edition of Granta). He talked about his marriage to his partner in South Africa, and the exhortation of the registrar that they should make more of a fuss of the event than they had planned. I quoted it last night when discussing plans with my daughter for her wedding next year (not that she wasn't planning to make some kind of a fuss on her big day.)
Lois Walden's reading was from an autobiographical novel called
One More Stop, and Paul Harding's tale of infidelity in Greece had a ring of truth to it, though he didn't reveal how much of what he described in his work of fiction was based on what might have happened to him. Which brings me to my friend Rebecca Chance's reading, which was a fabulously camp story of a cat fight in a burlesque club in New York between a stripper dressed as a mermaid and a coked-up woman in a wig whose father has been the stripper's lover. I'm glad she chose it, as it's my favourite part of her book,
Divas. I do sometimes wonder, as I read her highly entertaining 'bonk-busters', just how much of what she writes is based on her life's experiences...
Last night I took part in YARN's
Illustrationarium Live. YARN is a festival of story and story-telling that incorporates theatre, film, music and art. Illustrationarium Live matched authors and story-tellers with artists who illustrated live while we told our tales. I performed a half hour comic monologue I had written about time travel while
Jessica Allan illustrated on an acetate on an OHP. Her illustration was brilliant and the event was hugely enjoyable. I was delighted to be a part of it. There's a set of photos on Flickr
here by the
Soupa creative network and some more on
Facebook from
Cure Studio.
YARN con
tinues with '
cover wars' tonight - four teams of illustrators 'compete' to illustrate a cover for Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia while he reads from the book. Then on Tuesday there's
The Special Relationship, another story-telling event featuring
Simon Munnery,
Jarred McGinnis, Sam Taradash and Matthew Robins. On Wednesday, the festival finishes with the launch of
Ten Stories about Smoking by Stuart Evers. His stories will be intepreted into film, theatre, music and spoken word by artists including
The Strumpettes, Quattro Formaggio,
Verity Flecknell (Storm in a Teacup collective) and
Camila Fiori.
All my books are on offer at low prices. 
Oh look. Last week I went to 
d when I search
ed on the internet for 'Illustrationarium Live' to see if anyone else had written about it, I discovered that someone else had visited exactly the same events last week! They had even told a time travel story at YARN. And 
e only difference between my post and the one filed by the 'editor' of that
other blog is that the other post was tagged 'writing and bloggin' and the pictures weren't laid out neatly. Also, the other post was filed under 'writing jobs'. 
I like the way things are going for me in 2011. Besides, what else would I do?
