20315-08 Dylan Festival Prog:Layout 1

25/9/08

15:54

Page 7

Wednesday 5 November 7.30pm

The Dylan Thomas Prize Short List Nam Le and Edward Hogan will be introduced by one of the Prize Judges, and will read from their work and take questions from the audience. Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised Nam Le Edward Hogan in Australia. The Boat is a stunningly inventive, deeply moving fiction debut: stories that take the readers from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea, in a masterful display of literary virtuosity and feeling. Edward Hogan was born in Derby, in 1980. Blackmoor centres around a small mining community and Edward says he chose this setting because he wanted to find out more about the place he grew up. It's a regional book, about the midlands and the north and what has happened to the mining communities since people have stopped mining. His split time-frame is combined with multiple narrative perspectives, which enable him to dig deep into his characters. He is aided by writing that is charged with a bite and passion harking back to his Northern forebears; D.H. Lawrence, most obviously, with a passing touch of Charlotte Brontë. Thursday 6 November – 7.30pm

The Dylan Thomas Prize Short List Caroline Bird and Dinaw Mengestu will be introduced by one of the Prize Judges, and will read from their work and take questions from the audience. Caroline Bird was born in 1986. She grew up in Leeds before moving to London in 2001. She won the Poetry Society's Simon Elvin Young Poet of the Year Award two years running (1999 and 2000) Dinaw Mengestu Caroline Bird and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002. Her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, built on the traditions of fairy tale, fantasy and romance, was published in 2002. Her second collection, Trouble Came to the Turnip, was published in September 2006. She is currently studying English at Oxford University. In Trouble Came to the Turnip, Bird’s poems are ferociously vital, fantastical, sometimes violent, almost always savagely humorous and self-mocking. Her world is inhabited by failed and (less often) successful relationships, by the dizzying crisis of early adulthood, by leprechauns and spells and Miss Pringle's seven lovely daughters waiting to spring out of a cardboard cake. And the turnip. Dinaw Mengestu was born in Ethiopia in 1978 and is a graduate of Georgetown and Columbia Universities. He works as a journalist and reviewer and is researching a book tracing his extended family’s exile from Ethiopia following the 1974 revolution. Children of the Revolution won the Guardian First Book Award in 2007. Children of the Revolution is a book about one man’s longing for the American dream, and of the tenacious grip of the past across continents and time. It is a tale of an Ethiopian immigrant’s search for acceptance, peace and identity. With effortless prose, Mengestu makes the reader feel this tortured soul’s longings, regrets, and in the end, his dreams of meaningful human connection. 23 October - 10 November

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