Suddenly we’re out of winter and into conference season. It’s a joyful time of travel, meeting friends and colleagues, and talking writing or archaeology (and sometimes both). Conferences and festivals tumble one after the other in the run-up to Easter, which is why I haven’t been blogging and now have a backlog to report on.
The Alderney Literary Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary this March. It remains my favourite festival in the calendar due to its lovely location, neat format and concentration on historical fiction and non-fiction. Personally I’m getting bored of panels, as I much prefer a meaty 45 minutes slot with one author either giving a presentation or ‘in conversation’ with a moderator. Alderney delivers this, with the added bonus that the writer-historians have overlapping areas of interest and expertise making for lively discussions. I’m privileged to be part of the organising group, so get to talk books, travel and history with the speakers long into the evening over drinks and dinner.
Rosie Garland was talking about her book The Fates, which felt ironic as our plane was grounded by fog and we got chatting while bouncing across from Guernsey to Alderney on a 12-seater launch. Half the authors were similarly held up, so festival chair Tony Riches stepped up to deliver the first talk with a sideways look at popular perceptions of the siege of Troy.
Barely an hour after his delayed flight landed, Leo Tardiashvili was on stage in conversation with me about his debut novel Hard by a Dark Forest. A genre twisting story of a Georgian refugee returning to his homeland to unravel a trail of clues, it’s quite the best novel I’ve read since last year and I thoroughly recommend it.
Simon Scarrow talked about German policing under the Nazis, which formed the background for his Schenke detective novels. I followed this avidly as it has parallels to how Department Z evolves in my slightly alternate 1930s series. Sticking with WW2, Claire Mulley introduced the Polish resistance fighter featured in her book Agent Zo whose real-life achievements and chilling experiences read like a thriller.
As a complete change Lesley Downer gave a talk about her A Brief History of Japan steering clear of most of the factoids we think we know about Japanese history and in particular she related how Japanese courtesan culture gradually gave way to the rise of the demure Geishas. Eleni Kyriacou revisited a Greek Cypriot murder and Flora Johnston took us to 1919 Paris. Lavie Tidhar rooted around the dirt of the past as a basis for his interlinked short story collection Six Lives.
Ellen Alpsten, author of the Last Princess gave a detailed technical talk on how to write a historical novel. It was thoughtful and intense stuff- I took three pages of notes while keeping an eye on the clock as I was the room manager for the event. Emotion, not events drive the novel she says. Anna Abney discussing the Duchess of Newcastle, arguably the author of England’s first novel, underlined the point that characters don’t have hindsight – we know what will happen to the arc of history but they don’t.
We ended with a panel discussing the linearity of time, a ramble through history and how humans want to put events into order and make sense of cause and effect. History is not a science, in that each event is unique and can’t be repeated. Our lives are stories and we don’t know how or when they will end. And eventually, despite our desire to document and record events most knowledge will be lost. So we authors write about the past and hope our readers enjoy the adventure.
Sadly there won’t be a festival in the same slot next year, but the Alderney Literary Trust will continue to run smaller events. A link to their website is here.