Author events
Tuesday 6 September 2011
James Robertson
St Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Park Rd, Milngavie
3.00pm, 6 September, £5/£4 (C)
Tea/coffee included
James Robertson, author of The Testament of Gideon Mack, reads from his epic novel And the Land Lay Still, (winner of the Saltire Prize 2010) which charts 60 years of political, social and cultural change in Scotland from the end of the Second World War to the present day.
Sold out (at 1 September) but check back here for availability
Official opening reception with Kaye Adams followed by How did I get published? – New Writers’ Panel, Lillie Art Gallery
7.00pm, 6 September, opening reception
7.30pm, How did I get published?
£4/£3(C) Includes glass of wine/soft drink
Come and enjoy a glass of wine at our opening reception then take your seats in the gallery for Kay Adams to declare the Milngavie Book & Arts Festival 2011 officially open. She will be followed by an exciting panel of new authors chaired by Leela Soma.
Leela Soma: Chairing the panel is the local poet/writer Leela Soma. Her first novel ‘Twice Born’ was published in 2008. A retired Principal Teacher, she has been writing both poetry and prose. Her experience of finding a publisher for her second novel is highlighted in this panel event. Her second novel ‘Bombay Baby’ is due to be launched in October/ November of this year.
Pauline Wilkie was inspired by the New Writer’s Panel last year and decided to self-publish her book. She will discuss how and why she took this decision. She was lecturer in mainstream teaching in Further and Higher Education and became interested in complementary therapies and the ancient art of using natural crystals for healing. She has just published her first book, ‘Crystal Messages: how to access and interpret crystal information.’
Bert Mitchell: R.J. Mitchell graduated from Glasgow University in July 1989 with a master’s degree in Medieval History before joining Strathclyde Police Service later that year. After 12 years of police service, he started a new career as a sports journalist. He is currently a sportswriter with the Glasgow Evening Times. His first book Parallel Lines: The Glasgow Supremacy is a crime novel with a love triangle, making the outcome a matter of life and death. It has been published by Strategic Book Group, LLC.
Maggie Rabatski: is Hebridean by birth and upbringing but Glasgow has been her home for many years. When she retired from Social Services, Maggie joined Donny O’Rourke’s inspirational Creative Writing class at G.U. and has since had poems published in various literary magazines and in New Writing Scotland. Her first poetry pamphlet ‘Down From The Dance’ was published by New Voices Press in 2010 and short-listed in the First Book section of the ‘prestigious’ Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards 2011. Maggie writes in both English and Gaelic.
Wednesday 7 September 2011
Alasdair Alexander
Milngavie Library 2.30pm, 7 September
Free event hosted by East Dunbartonshire Libraries in association with the festival. Tickets for this event are available at East Dunbartonshire libraries and the Lille Art Gallery.
Retired BBC television sports broadcaster Alastair Alexander discusses his passion for naval history which he first revealed with the publication of Action Stations!, an illustrated history of naval warfare on the Clyde in the 20th century.
Amongst many fascinating insights into the subject, he will also cover the sinking by HMS Gleaner of U-33 off Arran and how it helped to crack the Enigma code.
Alastair Alexander was brought up in Greenock and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. He worked in the building industry while also maintaining a career as a sports commentator at BBC Scotland for over 40 years. On retirement in 2005, his abiding fascination for the history of naval warfare led to the publication of this book.
Fiona Martynoga
Mugdock Country Park 7.00pm, 7 September, £5
Fi Martynoga is a museum researcher, author and journalist, and a long-standing volunteer and board member of the environmental charity Reforesting Scotland, for whom she has compiled the Handbook of Scotland’s Trees. She was also a contributing editor for Woodlanders: New Life in Britain’s Forests. She is involved with her local Transition group and is the author of the Tweed Green Cookbook. She lives in the Borders, near Innerleithen.
Burns for a’ that
With Len Murray and Bill Patterson
Corbie Ha’ 7.30pm, 7 September, £6.00
Bar available
The life and loves of Robert Burns: Scotland’s Bard in Words and song.
In his short life, 37 years, he had written innumerable poems
and over 300 songs and every one a gem. The story was written and is
narrated by Len Murray One of Scotland’s leading authorities on
Robert Burns.
Robert Burns was voted by the people of Scotland as the Scot of the Millennium. The narrative is illustrated in songs and music by some of Scotland’s most experienced musicians and folk singers who have come together as Tha Tighinn Fodham.
Sold out (at 1 September) but check here for availability
Photo courtesy of Scottish Libraries.
May Nicholson Miracles from Mayhem
Event hosted by Milngavie churches in association with the festival
Allander Church 8.00pm, 7 September, £5/£4(c)
Proceeds will go to the Preshal Trust.
May Nicholson was a notorious fighting drunk in Ferguslie Park, Paisley until her life changed when she was 34. The last 22 years have been spent tirelessly workingas an outreach worker in Ferguslie Park, Church of Scotland Project Worker in Mid Craigie (a deprived area of Dundee) and now in Govan where she founded the Preshal (Gaelic for precious) Trust.
May’s biography reads as though she is telling her story and is interspersed by accounts and comments from other people.
Thursday 8 September 2011
Sue Peebles The Death of Lomond Friel – Winner of the Saltire First Novel award
Milngavie Library 2.30pm, 8 September
Free event hosted by East Dunbartonshire Libraries in association with the festival. Tickets for this event are available at East Dunbartonshire libraries and the Lille Art Gallery
Sue Peebles was born in Scotland in 1955, but spent some of her childhood in Detroit. Since graduating in Psychology she has worked as a researcher, social worker and university teacher. Sue lives in Fife and this is her first novel.
A stunning debut novel about a family in crisis, written with extraordinary compassion, humour and grace. A young woman’s life is thrown into disarray when her father has a stroke.
Peter Wright
Mugdock Country Park 7.00pm, 8 September, £5
One of the strong threads that has linked both Peter`s work and leisure time, has been young people and the outdoors.
With a career largely in youth work, and latterly running the Duke of Edinburgh`s Award in the Edinburgh area, he was also a co-founder of Youth in Trust (now NTS Conservation Volunteers and Thistle Camps), instigator of The Green Team, and co-founder of the John Muir Award, amongst a variety of other things.
“Lets make it happen for young people” could well be his motto, because that is indeed what he has done. So he applied the same resolve to his own Watershed epic in 2005, with his trek along 1,200km of bog, rock, mountain, moor and forest – the genesis for Ribbon of Wildness – Discovering the Watershed of Scotland. Sharing his experiences with others now pretty much fills his retirement.
Cargo special delivery…
7.00pm, 8 September Lillie Art Gallery, £3.50
Allan Wilson, RM Hubbert (music), and special guest Bernard MacLaverty.
Allan Wilson, a local lad from Baljaffray, writes short stories, novels and plays. He was selected via the open submissions process to appear in ‘The Year of Open Doors’ and was shortlisted for the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2010.
His first book “Wasted in Love”, a collection of short stories, is due to be published by Cargo on 11th October 2011.
Friday 9 September 2011
Afternoon Tea with Jess Smith “A Life Without Walls”
Allander Church 2.00pm, 9 September, £7/£6 (C)
Includes tea/coffee and cream scone
Let Jess guide you through the ways of the misty wanderers. Share tales and reminiscences over cream tea with Jess, a truly charismatic speaker with innate storytelling ability. Share nights around campfires, taste virgin water at its source, listen to the weasel pierce the eardrums of the hypnotised rabbit.
Hear the monarch of the glen as he challenges his foes at rutting. Watch in wonderment the rainbow coloured spine of a Scottish Salmon battling through rapids, onwards to her favoured spawning water.
Jess truly is the Scotia Bairn.
Poets from two Continents
Poetry, storytelling and music with Tawona Sithole and Leela Soma
Allander Church 4.00pm, 9 September, £4.00
Includes tea/coffee
Tawona Sithole grew up with the oral tradition that celebrates the morals and lifestyle of his ancestral family, Moyo Chirandu. As a son of this family he is better known as Ganyamatope. Playing mbira music and poetry and sharing his heritage with others helps increase awareness of lesser-known perspectives of his experience.
From Zimbabwe, living in Glasgow, he is co-founder of Seeds of Thought – a collective that aims to promote sharing of cultures through the arts. Here’s a taster of his poetry.
Leela Soma is a local poet and novelist. Her first collection of poems’ From Madras to Milngavie’ raised money for Cancer Research. One of her poems was recently published in the prize-winning literary magazine ‘Gutter’. She has read her poems at the Courtyard Readings at the Edinburgh Festival, various events in Glasgow and at Poetry Scotland Weekend in Callander.
Leela’s poems reflect the two cultures of Scotland and India.
John MacLeod
Banner in the West: A Spiritual History of Lewis and Harris
Allander Church, 7.30pm, 9 September, £5/£4(c)
The son of Lewis parents and the Free Church manse, John MacLeod was born in Lochaber in 1966 and educated at Jordanhill College School, Glasgow; James Gillespie’s High School, Edinburgh; and Edinburgh University. After graduation in 1988 he fell quickly into freelance journalism ‘by some sort of awful accident’ and remains youngest ever Scottish Journalist of the Year (at twenty-five, in 1991).
He has won a clutch of awards and has written for The Scotsman and The Herald. Since 2002 he has written a weekly column for the Scottish Daily Mail.
His seven books include Banner in the West: A Spiritual History of Lewis and Harris (2008); the acclaimed When I Heard the Bell: The loss of the Iolaire (2009) – which was shortlisted for the Saltire Prize; River of Fire: The Clydebank Blitz (2010) and None Dare Oppose: The Laird, the Beast and the People of Lewis. He returned to Stornoway in 1993.
Saturday 10 September
John MacLeod
River of Fire: The Clydebank Blitz
Allander Church, 11.00am, 10 September, £6/£5 (C)
Includes tea/coffee
In River of Fire: The Clydebank Blitz, John seeks to redress the balance often seen between the bombing of Clydebank reduced to a footnote or a short paragraph in other historical works. In proportion to its size Clydebank suffered more damage than any other place in Britain during World War 2.
John’s book not only tells the human story of those two terrible nights, but also explores the wider social and economic context and suggests why this very important event in the history of Britain during World War 2 was so marginalised by the media and the establishment.
Robert Douglas
Allander Church, 1.00pm, 10 September, £6/£5 (C)
Includes tea/coffee
Glasgow’s best selling memoirs Night Song of the Last Tram, Somewhere to Lay my Head and At Her Majesty’s Pleasure, have consolidated Robert’s reputation as a most entertaining writer who combines the pithy and humorous with compassion and sentiment. With his usual blend of laughter and tears, Robert Douglas has delivered an engaging second novel of tenement life set in Maryhill Road Staying on Past the Terminus.
Glasgow 1961.
It is ten years since we last visited the close at 18 Dalbeattie Street in Maryhill. The stalwarts are still there…Ella, Drena, Rhea and ‘Granny’ Thomson (86).
Irma the German war bride speaks fluent Scots nowadays. Well, ‘Fluent’ if you were brought up in the same close as the Broons and Oor Wullie.
Glasgow’s beloved trams still run on the Maryhill Road.
But not for long. There will not be a tramcar left in Glasgow by the end of next year. The new tenant, Frank Galloway knows all about this – he’s a driver. The other new arrival is Ruby Baxter who impresses no one with her attitude – as Granny Thomson says “She’s no better than she ought to be, that yin!”
Sally Magnusson Life of Pee
Allander Church, 3.00pm, 10 September, £6/£5 (C)
Includes tea/coffee
It has made bread rise, beer foam, dyes stick and given us gunpowder, stained glass, Robin Hood’s tunic and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Soldiers in the trenches of Ypres used it as a gas mask, while cloth-makers from the Romans to weavers on the isle of Harris depended on it.
Broadcaster Sally Magnusson offers an exhilarating and often hilarious insight into the historical uses of what was once the most versatile industrial agent on earth. She also makes a passionate plea for us to give pee its place once again at the cutting edge of the green revolution. After an hour in the company of Sally Magnusson, the world will never look quite the same again.
Our famous Fish, Chip & Champagne crime night with Christopher Brookmyre and Mark Billingham
Cairns Church 7.30pm, 10 September
Doors open 7.15pm £15.
Join us with what promises to be a stimulating, entertaining and very witty evening with one of crime writing’s most talented double acts. Why not enjoy a glass of champagne and book an A1 Ambassador Taxi – Tel: 0141 956 2956 – to take you home safely?
To describe Christopher Brookmyre simply as a crime writer would be a crime in itself. This “raconteur, singer and comedian manqué” (Edinburgh Festival) has just published a new crime thriller – Where the Bodies are Buried – which confirms his status as one of the greatest writers in the crime genre.
Quite Ugly One Morning was the winner of the Critics’ First Blood Award for Best First Crime Novel of the Year in 1996, Bampot Central was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Macallan Short Story Dagger in 1997, Boiling a Frog won the Sherlock Award for Best Comic Detective in 2000 and All Fun And Games until Someone Loses an Eye was the winner of the seventh Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2006.
Thorne is back, and bigger than ever in Good as Dead: Mark’s Billingham’s first new novel since the hit TV drama Thorne , a television series based on DI Tom Thorne.
Mark Billingham was awarded the 2003 Sherlock Award as the creator of the Best Detective created by a British writer and has twice won the Theakston’s Old Peculier prize for best novel of the year. Mark Billingham was born and brought up in Birmingham. Having worked for some years as an actor and more recently as a TV writer and stand-up comedian his first crime novel was published in 2001. He lives in North London with his family.
Sold out (at 1 September) but check here for availability
