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The North London Literary Festival
The North London Literary Festival is an annual event held at Middlesex University and the surrounding areas of North London. The event is student-led in order for them to gain key experience, and the festival is free to access for students and the public. History Running annually since 1996, the festival aims to celebrate literary works through pop-up readings by students around North London, as well as guest speakers and workshops at the Hendon campus of Middlesex University. Speakers Previous speakers include Justin Cartwright, Philip Hensher, AL Kennedy, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Andrea Levy, Andrew Motion, Jan Pienkowski, Lord Puttnam and Fay Weldon Fay Weldon CBE, FRSL (born Franklin Birkinshaw; 22 September 1931 – 4 January 2023) was an English author, essayist and playwright. Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including ''Puffball'' (1980), '' The .... Notable speakers include: David Nicholls, author of One Day and Galaxy B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middlesex University
Middlesex University London (legally Middlesex University and abbreviated MDX) is a public research university in Hendon, northwest London, England. The name of the university is taken from its location within the historic county boundaries of Middlesex. The university's history can be traced to 1878 when its founding institute, St Katharine's College, was established in Tottenham as a teacher training college for women. Having merged with several other institutes, the university was consolidated in its current form in 1992. It is one of the post-1992 universities (former polytechnics). Middlesex has a student body of over 19,000 in London and over 37,000 globally. The university has student exchange links with over 100 universities in 22 countries across Europe, the United States, and the world. More than 140 nationalities are represented at Middlesex's Hendon campus alone. Additionally, it has campuses in Malta, Dubai and Mauritius as well as a number of local offices acro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jan Pienkowski
Jan, JaN or JAN may refer to: Acronyms * Jackson, Mississippi (Amtrak station), US, Amtrak station code JAN * Jackson-Evers International Airport, Mississippi, US, IATA code * Jabhat al-Nusra (JaN), a Syrian militant group * Japanese Article Number, a barcode standard compatible with EAN * Japanese Accepted Name, a Japanese nonproprietary drug name * Job Accommodation Network, US, for people with disabilities * ''Joint Army-Navy'', US standards for electronic color codes, etc. * '' Journal of Advanced Nursing'' Personal name * Jan (name), male variant of ''John'', female shortened form of ''Janet'' and ''Janice'' * Jan (Persian name), Persian word meaning 'life', 'soul', 'dear'; also used as a name * Ran (surname), romanized from Mandarin as Jan in Wade–Giles * Ján, Slovak name Other uses * January, as an abbreviation for the first month of the year in the Gregorian calendar * Jan (cards), a term in some card games when a player loses without taking any tricks or scoring ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Herbert
James John Herbert, OBE (8 April 1943 – 20 March 2013) was an English horror writer. A full-time writer, he also designed his own book covers and publicity. His books have sold 54 million copies worldwide, and have been translated into 34 languages, including Chinese and Russian. Biography Born in London, Herbert was the son of Herbert Herbert, a stall-holder at London's Brick Lane Market. He attended a Catholic school in Bethnal Green called Our Lady of the Assumption, then at 11 won a scholarship to St Aloysius Grammar School in Highgate. He left school at 15 and studied at Hornsey College of Art, joining the art department of John Collings, a small advertising agency. He left the agency to join Charles Barker Advertising where he worked as art director and then group head. Herbert lived in Woodmancote, near Henfield in West Sussex. He had two brothers: Peter, a retired market trader and John, an insurance broker. Herbert would write his drafts in longhand on "jumbo pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carol Ann Duffy
Dame Carol Ann Duffy (born 23 December 1955) is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, resigning in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly gay poet to hold the Poet Laureate position. Her collections include ''Standing Female Nude'' (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; ''Selling Manhattan'' (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; ''Mean Time'' (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and ''Rapture'' (2005), which won the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence in accessible language. Early life Carol Ann Duffy was born to a Roman Catholic family in the Gorbals, considered a poor part of Glasgow. She was the daughter of Mary (née Black) and Frank Duffy, an electrical fitter. Her mother's parents were Irish, and her father had Irish grandparents. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
One Day (novel)
''One Day'' is a novel by David Nicholls, published in 2009. Each chapter covers the lives of two protagonists on 15 July, St Swithin's Day, for 20 years. The novel attracted generally positive reviews and was named 2010 Galaxy Book of the Year. Nicholls adapted his book into a screenplay; the feature film, was released in August 2011, and a planned television series for Netflix. Plot Dexter and Emma spend the night together following their graduation from the University of Edinburgh, in 1988. They talk about how they will be once they are 40. While they do not become romantically involved completely, this is the beginning of their friendship. The novel visits their lives and their relationship on 15 July in successive years in each chapter, for 20 years. Emma wants to improve the world, and begins writing and performing plays, which remain unsuccessful, while Dexter travels through the world, drinking and hooking up with women. Eventually both move to London, where Emma bec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Nicholls (writer)
David Alan Nicholls''Births, Marriages & Deaths Index of England and Wales, 1837–2006''. 6B. p. 1327. (born 30 November 1966) is a British novelist and screenwriter. Early life and education Nicholls is the middle of three siblings. He attended Barton Peveril College at Eastleigh, Hampshire, taking A-levels in Drama, English Literature, Physics and Biology. He also took part in college drama productions, playing a wide range of roles. He went onto study at the University of Bristol, graduating with a BA in Drama and English in 1988. He later trained as an actor at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York. First career Throughout his 20s, he worked as an actor, using the stage name David Holdaway. He played small roles at various theatres, including the West Yorkshire Playhouse and, for a three-year period, at the Royal National Theatre. He struggled as an actor and has said "I’d committed myself to a profession for which I lacked not just talent and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fay Weldon
Fay Weldon CBE, FRSL (born Franklin Birkinshaw; 22 September 1931 – 4 January 2023) was an English author, essayist and playwright. Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including ''Puffball'' (1980), '' The Cloning of Joanna May'' (1989), '' Wicked Women'' (1995)'' and The Bulgari Connection'' (2000), but was most well-known as the writer of ''The Life and Loves of a She-Devil'' (1983) which was televised by the BBC in 1986. Married three times and with four children, Weldon was a self-declared feminist. Her work features what she described as "overweight, plain women". She said there were many reasons why she became a feminist, including the "appalling" lack of equal opportunities and the myth that women were supported by male relatives. Early life Weldon was born Franklin Birkinshaw to a literary family in Birmingham, England, on 22 September 1931. Her maternal grandfather, Edgar Jepson (1863–1938), her uncle Selwyn Jepson and her m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lord Puttnam
David Terence Puttnam, Baron Puttnam, CBE, HonFRSA, HonFRPS, MRIA (born 25 February 1941) is a British film producer, educator, environmentalist and former member of the House of Lords. His productions include ''Chariots of Fire'', which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, '' The Mission'', ''The Killing Fields'', '' Local Hero'', '' Midnight Express'' and '' Memphis Belle''. In 1982, he received the BAFTA for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema, and in 2006 he was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Puttnam sat on the Labour benches in the House of Lords, although he was not principally a politician. In 2019 he was appointed chair to thselect committee on democracy and digital technologies The committee published its findings in its ' report in June 2020. Early life Puttnam was born in Southgate, London, England, the son of Marie Beatrix, a housewife of Jewish origin, and Leonard Arthur Put ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Motion
Sir Andrew Motion (born 26 October 1952) is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson. Early life Motion was born on 26 October 1952 in London, to (Andrew) Richard Michael Motion (1921-2006),Essex Clay, Andrew Motion, Faber and Faber, 2018, dedication page a brewer at Ind Coope, and (Catherine) Gillian (née Bakewell; 1928–1978). Richard Motion was from a brewing dynasty; his grandfather founded Taylor Walker, but this had been absorbed by Ind Coope by Richard Motion's time. The Motion family were wealthy armigers who lived at Upton House, Banbury, Oxfordshire, and were prominent in the local area; Richard Motion's grandfather Andrew Richard Motion was a Justice of the Peace for Es ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sue Gee
Sue Gee (born 1947) is a British novelist. She is published by Headline Review and by Salt. ''The Hours of the Night'' was the controversial winner of the Romantic Novelists' Association Awards, Romantic Novel of the Year award in 1997. ''The Mysteries of Glass'' was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005. Biography Personal life Sue Gee's parents met and married in India in 1946 and returned to Britain in 1947, with the coming of independence to India. She and her brother David grew up on a Devon farm and in a Leicestershire village, before the family moved to Surrey in 1957. She lived for 27 years with the environmental journalist Marek Mayer: they married in 2003, two years before his death. Their son is Jamie Mayer. Sue Gee lives in London and Herefordshire. Background and career She was educated at the University of London, Goldsmiths College and at Middlesex University, where between 2000 and 2008 she was programme leader on the MA Creative Writing cou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrea Levy
Andrea Levy (7 March 1956 – 14 February 2019) was an English author best known for the novels '' Small Island'' (2004) and ''The Long Song'' (2010). She was born in London to Jamaican parents, and her work explores topics related to British Jamaicans and how they negotiate racial, cultural and national identities. Early life Levy was of primarily Afro-Jamaican descent. She had a Jewish paternal grandfather and a Scots maternal great-grandfather. She said in a 2004 article: "Jews went to Jamaica in the 1600s. My paternal grandfather was born Orthodox Jewish, from a very strict family, but after fighting in the First World War he became a Christian and came back and married my grandmother. His family disowned him, so I don't know much about them." Her father came to Britain on the in 1948, with her mother following later that year on a banana boat. Levy was born in Archway, north London, "the fourth, and baby, of the family, by a long way". She grew up on a council estat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Linton Kwesi Johnson (born 24 August 1952), also known as LKJ, is a Jamaica-born, British-based dub poet and activist. In 2002 he became the second living poet, and the only black one, to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series. His performance poetry involves the recitation of his own verse in Jamaican patois over dub-reggae, usually written in collaboration with reggae producer/artist Dennis Bovell. Early life Johnson was born in Chapelton, a small town in the rural parish of Clarendon, Jamaica. His middle name, "Kwesi", is a Ghanaian name that is given to boys who, like Johnson, are born on a Sunday. In 1963 he and his father came to live in Brixton, London, joining his mother, who had immigrated to Britain as part of the Windrush generation shortly before Jamaican independence in 1962. Johnson attended Tulse Hill School in Lambeth. While still at school he joined the British Black Panther Movement, helped to organise a poetry workshop within the movement, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
