Young Muslim Writers Awards 2018

by Catriona Troth

On the first of December this year, I had the pleasure of once again attending the annual Young Muslim Writers Awards, organised by the Muslim Hands charity. This event has been showcasing young talent since 2010. One of the early winners, Mina B Mohammad, went on to turn her short story into a novel which she published at the age of just 16. So the event, held this year in Senate House, University of London, is one I always look forward to.

In addition to the awards for writers in different age groups, YMWA also gives out a Special Award to a young person who has made an exceptional contribution to the education and empowerment of young people. In the first year I attended, three years ago, the award went to Malala. This year it was given to the children of Grenfell. The award was accepted by a group of eight children of all backgrounds who were all members of Kids on the Green - an organisation that is helping the young people to come to terms with the trauma they have suffered through music, art and drama. The group spoke movingly about dealing with panic attacks and flashback, of losing their homes and having to live in overcrowded hotel accommodation. Then they asked the audience to stand and hold a minutes silence in honour of the 72 Grenfell residents who lost their lives.

Once again, those presenting the awards reiterated the importance of hearing stories from the voices of all our communities.

Zainub Chohan, the awards’ organiser, reminded us of the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the danger of the single story.

Irfan Master, author of Out of Heart, spoke of giving a writing workshop in a school where many of the children were of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage. When he invited them to begin by creating a character, they all started with character with white British names. When he challenged them, they told him, “No one wants to read stories about us.”

Tim Robinson from the Anne Frank Trust pointed out that he was standing on the stage where - in the recent BBC television drama, Bodyguard - the Home Secretary was blown up by a bomb. Many viewers followed the gripping series, only to be disappointed that the showrunners fell back in the end on the tired trope of a Muslim terrorist. These stereotypes need to be challenged, he said, and it is the voices of young Muslims that will do it.

As always, it was the children’s own words that spoke most powerfully. Robinson quoted from a Instruments of Harmony by Amiera, shortlisted in the KS4 poetry category.

We will catch the lost voices of the bold, 

And let their stories be passionately told. 

Finally the instruments of harmony will be played, 

And our voices will sing in unity - no longer afraid.

Ameerah, winner of the KS 3 journalism award for Daggers Drawn, her piece examining knife crime in London described a woman who has just lost her son.

She sits across the table from me, clothed in a light Nigerian robe. Her hair is pulled pack in a neat bun; her face is perfectly made up. The only sign of trauma is in her eyes. Eyes that wander with no fixed point, glistening with tears. Eyes that do not seem to acknowledge there is another person in the room.

But these young writers also showed that they would not be pigeonholed into writing only about ‘Muslim issues.’

Umar who was shortlisted last year for his poem Oggletrog, won the KS1 poetry category this year for his poem Gluttbuts and Trumpalots that again channelled the linguistic playfulness of Edward Lear and Roald Dahl - but this time demonstrated an edge of political satire with its swipe at greed and excess consumption.

Gofradump Gluttbutt, greedy and sly,
Suited and booted in his dotty red tie
...
Pie factory owner and Chief Taster
Eats like a pig and a horrid food waster

Fatema, winner of the KS2 poetry award held the room spellbound reading her poem, Awakening: the wonderous journey from seed to flower.’

Dormant
we lie
swathed in robes
of cimmerian
shade

Winner of the KS2 short story award, Numa’s story A Feathery Tale, praised for the judges for its accomplished storytelling and elegant use of language, was a fantasy whose central character was a bird.

Lulu was a hoopoe, with a majestic crown of black-tipped feather that constantly opened and closed like an elaborate book. It was the closing of the day, the blood-shot sun bleeding into the sunset and diamonds encrusted the sky.

Finally, the Writer of the Year was chosen - winner of the KS4 short story award, Sabir Hussain Miah for his story The Worst Plan Ever. Caught on the hop - until he received the news that he’d been shortlisted he had forgotten he had even submitted his story to the event, and certainly didn’t expect to win! - he nonetheless spoke movingly about being inspired by his own experience of bullying to write his story about overcoming prejudice and finding the strength to come out of darkness.

This year, Muslim Hands had announced that was giving the Writer of the Year and someone from their family the chance to visit one of the schools that they have built around around the world. I hope the trip inspires Sabir to yet more amazing writing!

It is always such a pleasure to attend this event. The 2019 event is already open to submission - so parents and teachers, if you have a talented young Muslim writer in your midst, please do encourage them to submit!

Asian Writer Festival 2018

by Catriona Troth

Having missed last year’s inaugural Asian Writer Festival, I was delighted to find I could make it to the 2018 Festival - particularly as it coincided with the tenth anniversary of Asian Writer magazine.

Asian Writer is produced by Farhana Sheikh, who is also the brains and energy behind Dahlia Publishing. She has been a tireless champion of Asian voices, and for the Festival she had assembled an impressive array of talent from across a range of genres. If you haven’t already discovered these authors, then treat this as an introduction to your next list of must-reads. 

Call Me A Writer

The day opened with a keynote address from Vaseem Khan, author of the Baby Ganesh series of detective novels set in modern day Bombay. In Call Me a Writer, he addressed the perennial reluctance to own that label. Put the cart before the horse, he exhorted his audience - think ‘I am an author’ (not ‘One day I will be...’). In his Commandments of Khan, he also addressed some of the dilemmas peculiar to authors from a non-mainstream background. Put diversity in perspective, he told his audience. Lend your voice to change, but don’t get wrapped up in it.

Write What You Know?

The first panel of the day addressed the validity of the perennial advice given to novice writers - should you write what you know? Both Winnie M Li and Gautam Malkani have followed that advice to an extent. Li’s novel Dark Chapter, which won the 2017 Not the Booker Prize, is closely based on her own experience of being raped by a stranger while out hiking. And Malkani’s second novel, Distortion, was inspired by his own experience as a young carer. But both have stretched their work well beyond the boundaries of their own experience. Li also wrote through the eyes of her 17 year old rapist - or someone very like him - imagining what could have led him to carry out the attack. On the other hand Malkani drew on the experiences of a much wider pool of young carers to create his character Dhilan, while Anappara used what she learnt as a journalist to create her cast of young street beggars, allowing their funny, cheeky side to emerge in a way that wasn’t possible in journalism.

The Asian Writer Anthology 

In honour of the Asian Writer’s tenth birthday, the festival also saw the launch of a new Asian Writer Anthology, featuring writers they have worked with over those ten years. Emma Smith-Barton read an extract from her novel The Million Pieces of Nina Gill which explores a young woman’s anxiety disorder following the disappearance of her brother disappears. Mona Dash read Formations, a short story which explores food as a basis for relationships and identity. And CG Menon’s read her lyrical short story Seascapes was also one of my favourite stories from her anthology Subjunctive Moods (reviewed here).

Menon also talked about how submitting a story to the Leicester Writes Prize had changed her writing life, and urged the audience not be afraid to get their stories out there. “It’s empowering. Every time you are listed, it’s a candle propped up against the howling darkness.”

The Only Way is Commercial 

It has often been particularly difficult for writers from a minority background to break into commercial fiction. As Vaseem Khan discussed in his opening address, too often there is pressure from those within the publishing industry to stick to writing about (as they see it) ‘minority issues’. But after lunch, we heard from two authors who have managed to bust out of those restrictions: Ayisha Malik and Amer Anwar.

I loved Malik’s first novel, Sofia Khan is Not Obliged, a romantic comedy with I described in my review as Bridget Jones with real heart. The sequel, The Other Half Of Happiness is now out and moves on from the minefield of dating to the complexities of marriage. Amer Anwar is an author I had not read before, though I’d heard a lot about him. His debut novel, Blood Brothers, is set in and around West London’s Sikh and Muslim dominated communities of Southall and Hounslow and follows Zaq, a young ex-prisoner manipulated into helping his boss track down his runaway daughter.

SI Leeds Literary Prize 

The final treat of the day was to hear from the all the finalists of the SI Leeds Literary Prize, the results of which had been announced just days before. This is a prize awarded biennially for a work of unpublished fiction by UK-based Black and Asian women, aged 18 and above. Previous finalists have included Kit de Waal and Winnie M Li. This year’s finalists were:

• Mona Dash, the opening paragraph of whose Let Us Look Elsewhere might serve as a mission statement for the Asian Writer Festival. 

I imagine you come here with expectations. You want to hear tales, of the sari, of the mango, of cow hooves kicking up a dry dust you will want to wipe off with a scented handkerchief. You want to hear of lavender, of turmeric, of jasmine soothing the hot summer evening in a distant tropical country. You expect to be told stories of a certain woman, a certain man in a certain way. You want to feel, but nothing beyond the ordinary, nothing you cannot stomach along with a thick steak, the knife a tad bloody from the rare meat.

• Yoanna Pak, whose novel Wolnam looks at trans-generational trauma through the eyes of a Korean father and a Canadian daughter. 

• Khavita Bhanot whose novel Baba ji on Boulton Road, about a young guru in Handsworth was awarded Third Prize. 

• Yvonne Singh, whose One Man’s Revolution - set during the aftershocks of the financial crisis and which follows a young man drawn into religious sect that declares capitalism the enemy - took 2nd prize. 

• Omega Douglas, who won the Readers’ Choice award for her novel Hibiscus Rose Jacaranda which captured the shattered sense of belonging of a new resident in London in the face of the government’s ‘hostile environment.’ 

And the overall winner was Shereen Tadros. Her novel Say Goodbye To Her is set in Egypt in the 1950s and addresses the tension between tradition and modernity through the voice of a child narrator. The stunning passage she read broached difficult subject of female genital mutilation with empathy and tenderness. If this does not find a publisher very soon so that I can read the rest, I shall be bitterly disappointed!

You can read extracts of all the shortlisted novels here.

All in all, this was a wonderful event, seamlessly organised. I look forward to next year!

Bill Bryson and Ben Hatch: Bringing Down the Curtain on the 8th Chorleywood Lit Fest

by Catriona Troth

There were so many events I would have liked to have attended at this year’s Chorleywood Lit Fest.  Ranulph Fiennes, David Suchet, Anne de Courcy... I was particularly disappointed to miss Kate Adie talking about her new books, Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War I.  But that night I was having dinner with my Triskele colleagues, on the eve of our own appearance on the Festival’s Fringe - and hey, an author’s got to do what an author’s got to do.

Once our own event was safely behind us, though, I was delighted to be able to snag tickets for the last two events of the Festival - Ben Hatch talking about his travelogue, The Road to Rouen and Bill Bryson talking about his latest book, One Summer: America 1927.

BEN HATCH

By coincidence, Ben Hatch had just completed JJ Marsh’s 60 Second Interview for Words with Jam (the second fastest ever respondent!). So I’ll confine myself to saying that he is every bit as funny in person as his books would suggest, and to sharing a handful of Ben’s best travel tips:

The secret of packing a car:

“You have to have all your suitcases identical sizes so they are interchangeable. They have to be squishy - and different colours so you can tell which one is which so you don’t end up inside the hotel with no toothbrush and no pants.”

The definitive argument against bringing too many shoes:

“Because my wife brought so many pairs of shoes, the children couldn’t bring many toys, and that meant they made toys out of ‘found objects’. At one point my daughter started treated her cardigan as a doll.  The cardigan was called Ella and she had to sit in the high chair and ride in the push chair, even if it meant our youngest had to walk.  The low point was at the Wedgewood Visitors’ Centre, when we had a fork out £5 for some clay so Ella could press a shape into it.  It’s one thing to be bossed  around by a four year old, but being bossed around by a four year old’s cardigan was too much. And all because my wife brought too many shoes.”

France or Italy?

“Italy, definitely, because of the way they deal with children.  In France, children are expected to behave like small adults.  We were shushed everywhere.  We were shushed in a museum where the only other person in the whole building was the security guard.  We were shushed by a homeless person on the street! But in Italy they let children be children. They can’t do enough for them.”

So what next for the Hatch family?  Ben is hoping to get a book deal so he can write up this summer’s trip to Italy, and he is in talks with a film company about a film of his first book, Are We Nearly There Yet?

And what about future trips? “I’d like to drive coast to coast across America.  Or maybe the trans-Canada Highway.  Or South Africa. But I guess that will have to wait until the children are a little older.”

BILL BRYSON

I have been a fan of Bill Bryson’s ever since I read the opening chapter of Notes from a Small Island.  As it happens, he came to England from Iowa the same year as I returned from Canada - and his description of the culture shock of arriving in Britain from North America in the 70s brought back floods of memories. (No central heating, pervasive damp, one bar electric fires that smelled of dust and burnt your calves while leaving the rest of you freezing, candlewick bedspreads and half-day closing...) Clearly he was a kindred spirit.

The other reason I was looking forward to the evening was that - as she reminded me - 1927 was the year my mother was born.  “He’s billed it as the year of crooks, murderers and heroes. I want to know which one I am,” she told me.

With characteristic self-deprecation, Bill begins by telling us the story of the only time he has been recognised in the street his own country - only to find it was not a fan, but one of his son’s room-mates.

He then shared some of his favourites from his lifelong collection of unfortunate headlines and bizarre typos that began when, as a baffled American trying to get to grips with the vagaries of British English, he was faced with an article about declining seafood stocks in Cornwall in which every instance of the word ‘crustascean’ had been replaced with the words Crewe Station. This could probably only be topped by the over-zealous political correctness that changed as sentence about ‘Massachusetts accounts back in the black’ to ‘Massachusetts accounts back in the African American.’

Eventually, he is induced, somewhat reluctantly, to talk about his new book. (“When I read a new book, I don’t want to be told about all the best bits beforehand,” he protests.)

He began the book with the coincidence of two events - Charles Lindbergh flying the Atlantic and Babe Ruth, right at the end of his career, hitting 60 home runs in one season for the New York Yankees. He planned to write two parallel biographies that would intersect in the summer of 1927.  But when he began to research the book, he discovered an extraordinary confluence of event in that one summer.  It was the year that the Jazz Singer came out, the year of Al Capone’s downfall and the end of prohibition. The year of the Mississippi Flood and of a now-forgotten school massacre that eclipses Columbine or Sandy Hook.  And so the book changed.

True to his promise not to give too much away, he reads only one extract from the book, about Lindbergh’s landing in Paris at the end of his trans-Atlantic flight. If we think the cult of celebrity began with Beatles-mania in the 1960s, we need to think again. As Bryson vividly demonstrates, when Lindbergh left the coast of Newfoundland and disappeared from contact, the whole world held its breath.  When he reappeared over Ireland and it became clear that he would make it to Paris, crowds began to gather at Le Bourget airport. They stopped the traffic.  They swamped the runway.  They damaged Lindbergh’s plane with the sheer pressure of their bodies and in their enthusiasm, violently assaulted an innocent American bystander who was mistaken for their hero. In comparison, Beliebers are models of decorum and restraint.

But Bryson will not be pinned down.  For the rest of his talk, he tells stories that are drawn from across his range of books - from exactly why the only way he will now be killed by a light aircraft is if one falls on him from the sky, to the best advice on how to avoid bear attacks.

Bryson has now lived in Britain for most of the last forty years.  What, he is asked, does he like best about the British?

“Your humour,” he answers, without hesitation. “When we moved back to the States for a few years, this was what we missed most.  Just the little jokes you make out of everyday life. I found myself making those kind of jokes myself and they would fall completely flat. There was this one time when a neighbour’s tree came down in the night.  I got up to find him sawing it up and loading the pieces onto his car.  It was kind of a bushy tree and bits were hanging down. ‘I see you’re camouflaging your car,’ I said.  He looked really worried. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘The tree fell down.’”

And what does he like least? He hesitates - clearly reluctant to offend.  Our tendency to complain and the lack of can-do attitude in officialdom, he says at last. His years as Chairman of the Campaign for Rural England have left a few scars.

His favourite place to walk in the UK?  The Yorkshire Dales.  But the British countryside overall is something he is passionate about.  “The most intensively used land imaginable.  You’ve farmed it, mined it, built on it, driven over it.  And yet so much of it is still spectacularly beautiful. That’s an extraordinary achievement and something you should be really proud of.”

The Chorleywood Literary Festival is indeed ‘The Greatest Little Lit Fest You’ve Never Heard Of - Till Now.’ Over the sixteen days from 6th November to 21st November, a total of 2700 people attended the 19 events put on at the 8th Chorleywood Literary Festival.

Chorleywood is only half an hour out of central London. So sign up here to get notice of next year’s Festival. And you needn’t wait another year. Sheryl Shurville and Morag Watkins - the indefatigable owners of Chorleywood Bookshop, put on fabulous author events throughout the year. Join their mailing list to hear all the latest news.

Catriona Troth is the author of the novella, Gift of the Raven and the novel Ghost Town. She is a former researcher turned freelance writer and a proud member of the Triskele Books author collective. Find her on Twitter as @L1bCat and on her blog/webpage at CatrionaTroth.com, or on Facebook at Books by Catriona Troth.

Wigtown Shuffle by Danny Gillan

As has now become the way of such things, I have waited for almost two months to write this recap of the Ed and my’s experience at this year’s Wigtown Book Festival. Being very careful at the time not to take any notes or even keep a copy of the programme, I have found over the years that this approach allows my thoughts to coalesce in a more satisfactorily freeform, amorphous way and leads to an article unburdened by bothersome impediments like facts and things that actually happened.

It was only a flying visit this year. Normally we like to spend at least two or three days checking the quality of wines and spirits in the many, many pubs of Dumfries and Galloway, however a combination of inconveniently ill husbands (the Ed) and a terminally sick bank balance (me) meant we were limited to one night only. We were forced to miss out on a few traditions - we didn’t manage a late night pizza, or even a lunchtime sausage supper, but we still drank a lot so it wasn’t all bad.

We made it to four events in total and, impressively for a book festival, only one of them involved an author with a book. One was a play, another was something to do with a bus and the fourth was Joanna Lumley.

As mentioned above, I can’t remember anything anyone actually said or did so I’ll stick to general impressions.

As you’ll know if you’ve been paying more attention than I have for the past few years, Wigtown is officially classed as Scotland’s Book Town. It is essentially a wee village, but chose to reinvent itself a while back by focussing on an already existing literary tradition and now boasts more book shops per head of population than any other town in, eh, the world (I’m guessing that last bit, but there are loads).

The town holds a variety of literary events throughout the year, but the big one is the two-week book festival in September/October. Its reputation has grown year-on-year and it is now held in such high regard that it regularly attracts literary luminaries like Joanna Lumley.

The Festival also has the downright decency to occur over my birthday, which means I can generally con a steak dinner out of the Ed as a birthday present, and for this I am truly thankful.

This was WWJ’s fifth visit to the festival. Although it took until last year for us to discover where the toilets are, most things have remained consistently impressive. The organisation is always impeccable, with all events starting on time and most of the people on stage being the person who was advertised. Equally impressive is the ability of the box office to lose our press passes every single year, but they’re always very nice about it so we don’t mind really. The Ed just holds up her phone displaying the confirmation email at them till they give us our pick of events. It’s possibly not the most efficient system, but we’ve come to find it endearing.

Sadly missing from the programme this year was the much-missed Iain Banks. He’d been there almost every year up until illness took him to the big book shop in the sky. Wigtown was the first place I saw him speak and, although already a huge fan of his writing, I instantly became an even bigger fan of him as a human being. Between our first visit in 2009 and our second the following year, I read every one of his ‘M’ Sci-Fi books, having previously limited my reading to his mainstream literature (never has the term mainstream been more misapplied).  By 2010’s Festival I was full of questions about this magnificent new universe to which I’d been introduced. Obviously I didn’t ask any of them because I’m both a star-struck fanboy and a terrible journalist. But I like to pretend he caught my eye at one point and we came to a silent understanding. I miss that man.

Another yearly occurrence has been not seeing Christopher Brookmyre. He and Mr Banks are probably tied as far as favourite author status goes. Unlike Banks, that Brookmyre fool has had the sheer  balls to schedule his appearances at Wigtown just a day or two before or after our visits. Every. Single. Year. I know he does it deliberately. I have of course caught him appearing at some other festivals over the years and keep meaning to call him out on his frankly shocking Wigtown record. But, again, terrible journalist.

Limited as it was, this year’s visit was not short of delights. We watched a wonderful, intimate production of August Strindberg’s 1888 play, Miss Julie. Performed in The Swallow Theatre, the smallest professional theatre in Scotland. Despite some dubious sexual politics and that weirdly prevalent reliance on suicide as an honourable way out of trouble plays sometimes have, the production was excellent. The three-person cast did a great job and the limited stage space and single set served to create a voyeuristic closeness that held the forty or so audience members in thrall from start to finish.

Robyn Young is writing a series about Robert the Bruce. So, being Scottish, obviously I loved her. Those historical fiction authors do a hell of a lot of research, it turns out. Who knew?

William McIlvanney & Neal Ascherson were in town to promote the re-launch of The Bus Party. Originally devised in 1997 as a way to encourage non-partisan debate about Scottish Devolution, the concept has re-emerged ahead of next year’s independence referendum. The hope is that a revolving group of artists, writers, musicians and thinkers will travel around Scotland, to all the wee places, and start a chat about the subject. The idea is to engage, not dictate. Some of the bus party are pro-independence, some against. All of them are open to discussion and debate. It’s a fine idea. If it passes your way, pay them a visit. They might even buy you a pint.

And then there was the goddess that is Joanna Lumley. And it turns out she really is a bit of a goddess. She manages that rare trick only a select few can pull off of being as posh as hell without being irritating as fuck. Stephen Fry and Peter Ustinov might be the only other two I’ve come across who could manage that one. She was appearing as a patron of the Peter Pan Moat Brea Trust, a worthy campaign to turn the childhood home of Pan creator J.M. Barrie into a haven for the promotion of literary education for children. She’s had a hell of an interesting life, that Lumley woman, and is a raconteur of epic proportions. I was left with the impression that it would be a magnificent thing if she was my auntie or something. But by marriage not blood, just to leave things tantalising. Plus she’s a bit Scottish, which always helps.

So, another tick in the box of Wigtown successes. I really would encourage all of you to try to get there if you can. It’s a beautiful thing in a beautiful place, surrounded by other beautiful places.

Also, if you don’t live in Scotland go next year at the latest. They might be shutting the borders after that.

Face to Face: Pitching to an Agent at the London Book Fair

by Catriona Troth

Pitches, on the whole, are an author’s nightmare. Generally speaking, they require a synopsis, some opening chapters and a covering letter.  But just how long is a synopsis?  How many chapters, pages, words do you include in your opening material? What are you supposed to put in a covering letter?  And how on earth do you convey what makes your writing unique, when you have just squeezed eighty thousand words down to a few hundred?

To make matters worse, each agent has their own guidelines, so a synopsis package that is perfect for Agent A may be entirely inappropriate for Agent B - even if you have done your research and know that they are both supposedly interested in the kind of book you are writing.  And - trickiest hurdle of all - how does an author find out if a particular agent has just closed their submissions window for women’s commercial fiction, or is actively looking for Young Adult dystopian fiction?

LitFactor is a new, online service that aims to provide authors with all the information they need about literary agents , updated daily. New agents, agents moving, new lists opening.  Who’s accepting, who isn’t.  

As it says on the LitFactor website: “Writers send off endless submissions to a long list of agents, only to hear nothing but the deafening sound of silent rejection. They become frustrated by the lack of feedback and can remain utterly oblivious to the nuances of how literary agents actually operate. At the receiving end, literary agents are constantly inundated by a veritable deluge of irrelevant, poorly-judged submissions that they have neither the time nor the inclination to wade through.”

The service was launched at the London Book Fair 2013, with the LitFactor Pitch - an opportunity for authors to present their book proposal to a literary agent, face-to-face, and get feedback on their ideas and submission material.

If you’ve attended any previous London Book Fair, you’ll know that literary agents tend to be secreted away upstairs in the International Rights Centre, isolated from any accidental contact with importunate authors. So to bring agents downstairs, in amongst the milling hoards in the Author Lounge, was a radical step.

Altogether, thirteen agents and seventy authors took part over three days. And Words with Jam was on hand to interview some of those authors who were lucky enough to make their pitches. 

Of the small sample that we interviewed, none had approached their pitch with the expectation of landing a deal there and then.

“I did it for the experience, and to make a contact for when I’m ready to make a paper submission,” said Emma Chilcote, who pitched her psychological thriller to Ariella Feiner from United Agents. “I almost cancelled at the last minute because the book isn’t even finished yet.  I was incredibly nervous, but Ariella was very approachable.  It all felt very informal and she gave me some really good advice on preparing submission letters.”

How had she prepared in advance?

“I had my three chapters and a synopsis, and I’d spoken my pitch aloud. I was aware that my synopsis was just a recital of the plot. But she explained how even the pitch and the synopsis must show off your writing, and that you should try and include some of the atmosphere of the story.”

Her experience was echoed by that of Words with Jam fan, Rachel Featherstone, who pitched her women’s commercial novel to Lorella Belli.

“I didn’t want to have a finished book and the perfect agent, and not have any idea how to make a pitch. This seemed a great opportunity to polish my skills.”  She too had a synopsis and cover letter prepared.  “I asked the readers of my blog and they pointed me to some great sources of advice.  I worked at going from a single line, to two or three lines, to a paragraph.  In fact, Lorella put me so much at my ease, I went off my brief.  She advised me how to keep it sharp.”

Belli also advised Featherstone to relate the book to contemporary novels. "Someone had previously suggested I compare the book to Bridget Jones Diary.  But Lorella said that agents would find that ‘so ten years ago’.  You have to find your niche, she said, otherwise you are just like everyone other author trying to publish Women’s Commercial Fiction.”

Someone else wresting with the same dilemma was Maria Constantine, also pitching to Lorella Belli. Maria, a veteran of the London Book Fair, had prepared her first submission pack after attending LBF11 two years ago.  And after attending seminars over the previous two days, she had sharpened her pitch further to focus on the commercial viability of the book.

“I think you have to be very sure of who you are as a writer to make a pitch like this in person. We writers are used to putting things down in print, not articulating out loud.”

So what feedback had she received?

“She asked me how my voice and my book are going to stand out from the crowd.  But that's very hard unless you begin to read a few chapters.”

We hope to bring you a more extended article on LitFactor in a future issue of Words with Jam.

Catriona Troth grew up in two countries, uses two names, and has had two different careers. She tries always to remember who she is at any one time, but usually finds she has at least two opinions about everything. She is the latest member of the Triskele Books writers’ collective and the author of the novella, Gift of the Raven.  

Liars' League

by Catriona Troth

Hello and welcome to Liars’ League - where writers write, actors read, the audience listens, and everyone of a nervous disposition should leave the room now, because tonight’s theme is TWIST AND TURN.

Thus compère Liam Hogan heralds the opening of Liars’ League sixth birthday event.

There are undoubtedly writers out there who are brilliant at reading their own work and love to do it. But let’s face it, the majority of us get nervous, stumble over our words, hate the sound of our own voices and would generally do anything to get out of the whole ghastly ordeal.

Step forward, Liars’ League, brainchild of novelist, playwright and creative writing teacher, Katy Darby.

“About six or seven years ago, I was attending Tales of the DeCongested, an event at Foyles where writers were invited to read their own work. It so happened that night, three authors in a succession managed to get in the way of their own text.  One was very nervous and started to speak much too fast, one had a thick accent, and one was much, much too quiet.

“I remember turning to my friend and saying, ‘wouldn’t it be brilliant if we could get actors to read the work for them.’ Actors don’t get nervous in the same way.  They are separate from the text and can play about with it.  They have clear speaking voices and they are trained to project. Writers could still have the pleasure of seeing an audience respond to their stories - laughing, or being thoughtful or sobbing into their pints - but without that pressure of performance.”

Nothing like that was around at the time, but Darby was determined to change that.  “I knew a lot of actors, I’d done some drama work at college, and I bullied all my friends from the UEA Creative Writing MA into submitting stories. We began in a little room above the Lamb in Lamb’s Conduit Street, which was perfect at the time.  Twenty people filled the room - thirty and it was packed.”

It didn’t take long to outgrow that space. These days, Liars’ League regularly attracts an audience of 40 to 50 people, often more.  Their new home - where they meet on the first Tuesday of every month - is in the basement of the Phoenix pub on Cavendish Square, just by Oxford Circus.

Liars’ League has since spawned three off-shoot groups - one in Leeds (currently dormant), one in New York and one in Hong Kong. Darby maintains an interest in them all, and reads and votes on submissions to all three.

So how can writers get involved with the Liars’ League?

Each month, a theme is selected - one with a fairly broad interpretation.  Writers submit stories of between 800 and 2000 words, which must be unpublished (in print or online), unbroadcast, and not a prizewinner in any previous competition. The Liars - a mixed group of writers and actors, of whom Darby is the heart, if not the head - judge the stories on quality of writing, fit with the theme and how well they translate into the spoken word. (Submission guidelines here.)

“Sometimes stories that work brilliantly on the page don’t work when spoken aloud,” says Darby.  “Perhaps they have too much dialogue, or too many different voices. I’ve learnt to read the stories aloud.”

All stories are judged anonymously and at least five or six of the Liars read every submission.  Actor-Liar, Cliff Chapman, joined the pool of acting talent two years ago after starring in a play written by Darby for Player-Playwrights.  “I’d sight-read for the part and Katy took that as my audition.  I read one of the stories for the Liars’ League Christmas event that year, and I’ve been doing it ever since.  Then last summer, one or two of the Liars were moving on, and Katy asked if I’d like to join the judging panel.  I guess what I bring to the group is that, as an actor, I can get a feel for how well a story will work in performance.”

Altogether, they receive 50 or 60 submissions each month, from which they select, typically, half a dozen for performance.

“Any that reach the top ten, we give feedback on,” says Darby. “As I writer myself, I know how frustrating it is to get a flat ‘no’ and have no idea if you missed by one place or a thousand. If something just wasn’t quite right, we encourage people to try again.  That way you build quality submissions.”

Once the stories are selected, they are matched with an actor from the Liars’ extensive pool of talent - someone with the right character profile or who can do the right accent, or just someone who has the acting ‘chops’ to do a particular story justice.

“We meet the weekend before each month’s event - usually with the writers as well, if they can come - and rehearse every story.”

Arriving early for the Twist and Turn event, I witness a final rehearsal of one story: ‘Meatheads’ by Dean Kisling.  Together, Darby and actor Steve Wedd work on the fine nuances of pause and emphasis, changes in pace. The story makes repeated reference to “the hawk-faced man who said little and stared intently,” and Darby admonishes Wedd to “hold that stare until the audience just starts to squirm.”

Unlike some Open Mic events that seem to be geared firmly to the under 35s, there is a big age spread here, among the actors, the writers and the audience.  Everyone is made to feel at home.

“We have some regulars.  And the writers and actors will generally bring along a few friends,” Hogan tells me. “But apart from that it’s very mixed.  You never really know in advance how a story is going to play.”

Carolyn Eden has experienced the Liars’ League both as an actor and a writer. 

“What I love about the Liars’ League is that there is no element of competition.  You send off your story and it’s accepted or it’s not.  But when it comes to the evening itself - it’s joyous, a celebration of good writing and wonderful acting.  There’s no bitchiness.  No side to anyone.”

So what is it like handing your words over to someone else, rather than standing up and facing the audience yourself?

“There comes a point where you have to trust the actor and trust the director, or you’ve no business submitting your stories,” says Eden.  “It’s never exactly as you heard it in your own head. But then often they bring out something that you never knew was there. And of course,” she smiles mischievously, “if they don’t like the story, it’s the actor’s fault - and if they like it, well, it’s all your own work!”

And with that we are ready for the first performance.  If you enjoy listening to audio books, you will know what a good actor can bring to the text.  But here you have the added dimension of the visual performance as well.  The comparison that springs to mind is one of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads pieces - though not all the stories are monologues, far from it. But there is that direct, intimate, one-to-one with the actor that sucks you into the stories and - in this case - allows the ‘twist’ hidden at the end to give you a pleasurable slap. 

I leave with a new ambition in my writers’ To Do list:  write and story good enough to be accepted by the Liars and hear it read by one of their brilliant actors.

All their performances are videoed - so if you can’t get to an event, the Liars’ website provides you with the choice of reading the stories, hearing them, or watching the performances. You can sample all the stories from the Twist and Turn event, including 'Meatheads' and Eden’s story, ‘Upside Down Pudding,’ here. http://liarsleague.typepad.com/liars_league/twist-turn/

The next London meeting of the Liars' League is on Tuesday 11th June from 19:30, downstairs at the Phoenix pub, Cavendish Square (doors open 19:00).  The theme will be Kings and Queens.

Catriona Troth grew up in two countries, uses two names, and has had two different careers. She tries always to remember who she is at any one time, but usually finds she has at least two opinions about everything. She is the latest member of the Triskele Books writers’ collective and the author of the novella, Gift of the Raven.  

Murder in the Library

The theme for the February edition of Words with Jam is Crime.  By coincidence, a new exhibition has just opened in the Folio Society Gallery of the British Library:  Murder in the Library - an A to Z of Crime Fiction.

According to the sign at the entrance to the exhibition, one in every three novels published in English around the world today is Crime Fiction - an astonishing indication of the enduring power of the murder mystery.  But where did it all begin?

The exhibition is arranged alphabetically, not chronologically.  But I found myself wondering back and forth between display cabinets, trying to piece together a timeline from the clues left by the curators.

Herodotus, the apocryphal Book of Susannah in Bible, Virgil and 13^th Century China are all suggested as possible sources of the ‘first’ murder mystery.  But the story that is generally considered to be the first piece of modern crime fiction is “Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe. This was published in 1841, one year before the first plain clothes policemen were employed in Britain and two years before the word ‘detective’ first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Seven years later, Recollections of a Police Officer, purportedly written by a real life policeman by the name of Thomas Waters, whetted the public appetite for stories of detection.  But it was the notorious Road Hill House murder in 1860 that whipped that appetite to a frenzy.

If you’ve read Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, you will know all about Road Hill House - the true case of a child murdered in an English country house. Lady Audley’s Secret, published the following year, was based on the story.  It gave rise, too, to ‘G,’ the heroine of The Female Detective in 1864.  Wilkie Collins based Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone on Jack Whicher, the Scotland Yard detective who investigated the murder.

If ‘G’ was the first female detective in crime fiction, then the first female crime writer was Anna Katherine Green, who created Ebenezer Gryce of the New York City Police Force in 1878. And long before Kay Scarpetta or Temperance Brennan, the first forensic scientist to lead a fictional investigation was Dr John Thorndyke, created by R. Austin Freeman in 1907.

The 1930s were an extraordinary decade for lovers of crime writing.  I’ve written about the Golden Age of English detective fiction in the February edition of the magazine.  In America, the reaction against stories that were simply intellectual puzzles led to the ’hard-boiled’ style of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler.  

At the same time, Dennis Wheatley and JG Links were producing ‘murder dossiers’ - volumes that contained witness statements, letters and even forensic items such as fibres and matchsticks, which you could pour over in an attempt to solve the crime.  The authors’ own solution would be held in a sealed envelope.  The solution to Walter Eberhard’s Jigsaw Puzzle Murder was literally revealed in a jigsaw that must be solved by the reader. Books like this were used as dinner party games.

The exhibition is dotted with some glorious treasures - a handwritten manuscript for Conan Doyle’s “Adventure of the Retired Colourman;” a film script for Murder on the Orient Express; John Gielgud’s own press album, open to show photographs of himself with John Thaw and Kevin Whately in an episode of Morse.

The last cabinet contains a first edition copy of Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair.  Alongside it are the proceedings of the case against Elizabeth Canning, the subject of two notorious trials in the 18^th Century and the inspiration for Tey’s novel.  In the first trial Canning accused two women of robbing her and holding her prisoner in a house which she could apparently describe in detail. Following an investigation by trial judge Sir Crisp Gascoigne, the guilty verdict from that trial was overturned and Canning herself convicted of perjury and transported.  The story could provide the model for a whole genre of miscarriage of justice stories, and you can follow the proceedings for yourself at Old Bailey Online (just enter Canning’s name in the search function).

Catriona Troth:  The Library Cat @L1bCat

Murder in the Library runs until the 12^th May.  Admission Free.