I made four visits this week to the Oxford Lit Fest, chairing four remarkable authors. This meant a lot of rushing up and down from Paddington, memorising the route: Slough (where I always think ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough / It isn’t fit for humans now’ – gosh, the power of a great couplet!), Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford… and back again.
My first event on Saturday 17 was with Frances Hardinge, about her new YA novel ‘A Skinful of Shadows’ (Macmillan £12.99), set during the Civil War. Accordingly our discussion ranged across Puritans, Oxford when it was King Charles’s HQ, witches, spies, trepanning and other 17th century medical procedures. Children ask such great questions. I enjoyed the the plaintive ‘Do you like animals?’ and whether the homicidal goose in Frances’s debut ‘Fly Away Home’ was ‘based on a real goose’? Quite wonderfully, the answer is yes!
The Spring Equinox was an appropriate time to be talking to Joanne Harris about her eerie fairytale ‘A Pocketful of Crows’ (Gollancz, £12.99), which sees a nameless nature spirit, the carefree brown girl, fall in love with the young lord in the castle, who names and tames her. He’s a fickle blond who’s about to pay dearly for his dalliance. Joanne talked fascinatingly about the roots of the story: an old almanac she picked up in a second-hand bookshop, and a series of ancient ballads which may well provide the inspiration for more works to come. Perrault and the Brothers Grimm also made an appearance in our chat.
On Wednesday I was intrigued to meet super-bestseller Sophie Kinsella, who arrived at the green room with husband and son (now studying at Oxford) in tow. She confessed to be awed at actually giving a talk in the Sheldonian, being an alumna herself (she read PPE at New College). As anyone who’s read her novels would imagine, it was a laugh-filled evening, with Sophie reading brilliantly from her latest novel ‘Surprise Me’ (Bantam, £18.99). As I pointed out, underneath the jokes her heroines frequently have moments of real anguish and despair – in the latest, protagonist Sylvie struggles to come to terms with the death of her father. We talked about Sophie’s time at Oxford and work as a financial journalist that led directly to the ‘Shopaholic’ series. She was fabulous, witty company.
Finally, what can you say about the extraordinary Ben Okri? Other than he always brings a surprise or two. In the corridor as we waited for the audience to be seated, he asked whether I’d help him read a few passages from ‘The Magic Lamp: Dreams of our age’ (Apollo, £16.99), his new book, a collaboration with artist Rosemary Clunie. We ended up reading alternate paragraphs of several of the riddling tales in the book, which certainly kept me on my toes. For these paintings Clunie seems to have used chance and the subconscious in her mark-making, which suited Okri’s somewhat mystical approach to storytelling perfectly. He led the audience into a discussion of Malevich’s painting the Black Square – he recommends looking at it for 15 and a half (or was it 16 and a half?) minutes for it to reveal its wonders. You don’t really interview Okri, you just go with him wherever he wants to go – he’s a true magician.