The last shout of summer

It’s either the last shout of summer, or the first whisper of autumn, but it’s when the small Cornish village of St Endellion hold their book festival, and we’ve been fortunate to have attended three times now – yes, we toddled down to Cornwall again to have a splendid few days indulging in everything bookish. We stayed in a beautiful little cottage, as shown in my featured image, and when I say little, I do mean petite – in fact I bumped my head on one of the beams and I am very much on the short side. Our little cottage was in the small village of Pendoggett, a five minute drive from St Endellion.

We attended various events, some together, some solo, and had a splendid time. One of several highlights for me was attending a performance by Luke Wright, a simple amazing poet. Read this review by my friend the poet Macaque:

https://thepoetmacaque.wordpress.com/2023/09/22/luke-wright-and-all-that-jazz/

Another very interesting event was ‘The Cream of Cornish’ – four very different writers introduced their books and gave a reading from them:

This year’s cabaret of readings from writers with Cornwall in their work or lives promises to be a vintage one. We have Eleanor Shearer, with her debut novel about slavery and its inheritors River Sing Me Home and Cornish success story Anna Mansell, reading from her latest bestselling romance, The Cheap Dates Club.  We have Ike Anya reading from Small by Small, a vivid memoir of his training as a doctor in Nigeria and poet, Sarah Cave, who’ll be reading from The Book of Yona, her new collection, which is about a queer saint who is also the sister of Jesus of Nazareth.

It was indeed a very mixed bag of new writing, but the outstanding writer to me – by profession a doctor, was Ike Anya; I bought his book which he very kindly signed for me, and I’m looking forward to reading it. No doubt I will review it here!

Another book I bought, having listened to her speaking, was ‘When the Dust Settles‘ by Lucy Easthope. To be honest, although the preview of her talk sounded fascinating, it was her name which caught my attention. Here is a headline biography:

Professor Lucy Easthope is the country’s leading expert on emergency planning and disaster recovery and is a Professor in Practice of Risk and Hazard at the University of Durham, co-founder of the After Disaster Network as well as a Fellow in Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath.

I was so pleased I decided to go, it was an interesting and thought-provoking talk about what happens after a disaster – “her astonishing career has embraced everything from the September 11 attacks, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the 7 July 2005 London bombings, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown, the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire and the COVID-19 pandemic .” As the festival introduction to her mentioned, she’s the woman you need when the siren sounds! The reason I bought a ticket to hear her speak (and I’m so glad I did) is her unusual name. I’ve mentioned here before that one of the best teachers I ever had, a most charismatic, knowledgeable, interesting man, Antony Easthope who was my lecturer at Manchester Polytechnic, donkeys years ago. I’m sure he has no connection to Lucy, but when I saw her name I was reminded of him and what a fascinating person he was. Lucy is also a fascinating person!

So, as you can tell, I had a marvellous, interesting and enjoyable time – but maybe the highlight for me, was attending an event starring Ann Cleeves, she who wrote the Shetland novels, the Vera Stanhope series, and her latest trio of books set in the area around the Devon rivers, the Taw and the Torridge, obviously named the Two Rivers series. Ann talked about her novels, of course, particularly her latest one, but she also spoke about writing and her way of writing – but I will save all that for another post!

If you want to know what else we got up to in Cornwall, read my talented friend Fenja Hill’s post about our adventures:

https://fenjahill.wordpress.com/2023/09/22/going-away-to-come-back/