The Humber Mouth Literature Festival 2009 (2/7)

(1/7), (2/7), (3/7), (4/7), (5/7), (6/7), (7/7).

Tuesday June 23rd David Crystal: GR8 TXT DB8 ArtLink, Princes Avenue 7.30pm £5 Box Office 01482 226655 Do young people text as much as people think? Do adults? Does texting spell the end of literacy? Is there a panic in the media? David Crystal looks at the evidence. He investigates how texting began and who uses it, why and what for.

He shows how to interpret its mix of pictograms, logograms, abbreviations, symbols, and wordplay, and how it works in different languages. He explores the ways similar devices have been used in different eras and discovers that the texting system of conveying sounds and meaning goes back a long way, all the way in fact to the origins of writing - and he concludes that far from hindering literacy, texting may turn out to help it. David Crystal is a linguist, academic and author. He has written over 100 books and is currently an honorary professor and part-time lecturer of linguistics at Bangor. His many interests include forensic linguistics, language death, ludic linguistics and lexicography. He is also a proponent of a new field of study, Internet linguistics. David Crystal lives in Holyhead with his wife; he has four grown-up children. Retired from full-time academia, he works as a writer, editor and consultant. Crystal was awarded the OBE in 1995 and became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000. 'He combines an extraordinary knowledge of linguistics with a gift for popularizing' TLS

Get Lewis 7.30pm Vue Cinema, Princes Quay Dir. Dave Windass £3.50 Box Office 01482 226655 www.tedlewis.co.uk www.singlespan.co.uk A unique opportunity to discover more about British noir author Ted Lewis and see the world premiere of a new short film.

Ted Lewis lived on the south bank of the Humber for much of his life and was the writer of Jack's Return Home, the book that became the film Get Carter. This event will include the world premiere of the short film Ted's Return Home (a fictionalised account of Lewis's life post-Get Carter) and an in-depth discussion about Lewis by the short film's screenwriters, Nick Triplow and Laurie Harvey, who are also currently writing the Ted Lewis biography. Lewis, an only child, spent his formative years in Barton-on-Humber and studied at the Hull School of Art & Design before working as an animator on the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. He wrote nine novels - All the Way Home and All the Night Through , Jack's Return Home, The Rabbit, Jack Carter's Law, Plender, Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon, Billy Rags, Boldt and GBH. His writing also included several episodes of the long-running drama Z Cars. The 20 minute short Ted's Return Home sees Lewis come face to face with one of his own characters - not in Newcastle but amid the southbank locations of the book. This informative and entertaining event will provide a perspective on the ongoing influence that Ted Lewis still holds over a host of contemporary crime writers and filmmakers.

Wednesday June 24th Clare Allan: Poppy Shakespeare Zest Cafe Bar, 17-19 Newland Avenue 8pm £5 Box Office 01482 226655 Book Now Clare Allan talks about writing Poppy Shakespeare. Brutally comic, brilliant and moving, Poppy Shakespeare looks at madness from the inside, questioning our mental health system and the borders we place between sanity and insanity.

Written in the electric voice of a mentally disturbed young woman, it is a stunning and original debut from a hugely talented writer. Highly inventive and darkly funny, Clare Allan's novel explores the relationship between N, a patient in a mental institution and Poppy Shakespeare, a new and disturbingly sane arrival, who finds herself having to feign mental illness in order to be released. Clare Allan was born in Newcastle in 1968. She grew up in a number of cities and attended a number of schools, embarking on a range of careers before suffering a breakdown at the age of 25. She spent ten years as a patient in the psychiatric system, after which she attained an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She was the winner of the first Orange/Harpers & Queen short story prize. She lives in London. This is her first novel. Poppy Shakespeare was adapted for broadcast by Channel 4 and awarded a BAFTA earlier this year. 'Poppy Shakespeare has that rare quality: the feel of a book that needed to be written ... It is bitterly, brutally funny and extraordinarily moving' Telegraph

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