Literary Society News 1 April 2017

Theatre outing 9 March 2017:

 A group of members went to the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury to see a spectacular production of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" Thanks to Hilary Roome, our new secretary, for organising this.

 Literary Society Meeting 17 March 2017: 

Thanks to Jonty Driver for the following:

Marion Molteno was born, brought up and educated in South Africa.  After involvement in student politics in the early 1960s, she and her husband, the academic Robert Molteno, moved to Zambia for eight years, until Robert himself was detained by the Zambian authorities, ostensibly for inciting students to rebellion.  She, Robert and their daughters relocated to London, where he became a publisher and she worked for UNICEF, traveling widely in Africa and Asia. She also came under the intellectual influence of the Urdu poet, Ralph Russel. Her stories and novels grow mainly from these experiences of the international and exiled communities: A Language in Common is a book of stories about the lives and work of women.  Then there are four novels; A Shield of Coolest Air, If you can walk, you can dance (set partly in London and partly in South Africa);  Somewhere More Simple (set mainly in the Scilly Islands) and Uncertain Light ( set in Central Asia).

In two talks in mid-March in Rye and Winchelsea, the first in the new Rye Bookshop under the capable leadership of Lizzy Lee, the second to the Winchelsea Literary Society, Marion talked first of her development as a novelist and then of how important place is as the setting of her novels. She was remarkably frank about the difficulties she had faced as a novelist:  after the critical success of her first book (which won a Commonwealth Writer’s prize), she expected to find an agent and a publisher without any difficulty; yet this proved not to be the case, and she ended by founding her own publishing house.  Hard work and the support of friends - and a certainty that what she was doing mattered artistically as well as socially - led to success, and her novels now sell comfortably well.  The most recent -Uncertain Light - has been a considerable success in the Indian sub-continent and a second edition is being published. Marion is also being invited to literary festivals in India and in the UK.

Of course luck plays a part:  at a meeting of writers in the Writers’ Centre in Norwich in 2015, Marion happened to make friends with an Indian writer;  hence the invitation to an Indian literary festival, and in due course an increasing readership in India and publication there. However, without imagination luck by itself would be of no consequence.  For instance, in If you can walk, you can dance, Marion’s own experience of learning to play the violin as a middle-aged student in London is brilliantly transmuted to an account of a character’s experience of learning to play the ‘cello.  For instance, her interest in Urdu poetry becomes a significant part of the story of Uncertain Light.

Those who hadn’t before read Marion’s novels but who heard her talk in Rye and/or Winchelsea will now be wanting to read her;  and those who already knew something of her work will be waiting, with considerable interest, to see what he

Future Events (1) :

The next LiterarySociety meeting is on Friday 21 April, when Guy Fraser-Sampson will be talking on: "British Crime Fiction: From the Golden Age to Brit Noir"  This is an alteration to the programme initially circulated. The play reading originally scheduled for this date has been postponed to later in the year.

Future Events (2) :

Ann Driver has asked me to draw attention to the following event: 

Canciones Amatorias 7th May Brighton

Eline Vandenheede is a young soprano with a world class voice. She possesses a beautiful, warm, rich and powerful velvet tone. 

She has studied at The Royal Conservatory of Antwerp and at The Guildhall in the Artist Masters Programme. Past roles include Ilse in Spring Awakening by Benoit Mernier, and the title role in Massenet’s Cendrillon at the Festival de Musique Valois 2016 in Provence. 

Distinguished pianist Chavdar Mazgalov accompanies.

More details can be found in the link: CLICK HERE

Future Events (3)

On Saturday 8th July, from 3-4 p.m. in the church of St Mary’s in the Marsh, as part of the JAM (John Armitage Memorial) Festival in the Romney Marshes, Jonty Driver be reading some of his sequence of poems, The Journey Back , first published in the 1990s, about his return visit to South Africa after thirty years of exile. Peter Fields will be playing on the violin a variety of pieces in between some of the poems. Admission is free, though there will be a collection for the Hantam Community Education Trust in the Karoo.