Another year, another awesome literature festival in Cheltenham
22nd October 2024
Now that the Chelt Lit Fest is over for another year, we can sit back and reflect on what a brilliant couple of weeks it’s been. Here is what our first year student, Nalani Lasmarias, thought about the festival and the Voicebox event on 10th October, when UoG students read their work to a live audience.
Reading The World at The Literature Festival
The Cheltenham Literature Festival is one of the UK’s oldest and most prestigious literary festivals, held every October in Cheltenham. The festival opens a space for new voices, attracting a diverse range of authors, poets, and thinkers, inviting book lovers from all over the country!
The UoG takeover represents a celebration of literature; specifically everything that has come before us and how it shapes the mind of the world.
. “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
ENGLISH LITERATURE – READING THE WORLD IN 75 YEARS
George Orwell’s 1984 and the Literature festival both born in 1949 are tied together to commemorate the last 75 years of reading! Throughout these 75 years we have faced censorship, freedom of speech, racism, sexism, homophobia; how do we overcome this? We write, we read, and we don’t stop when met with resistance. Books break boundaries.
Literature is the thread that binds us; the seam that weaves our cultures, our minds, and our hands. It enlightens, it kills, it brings us to life. If readers, writers have one thing it is hope, and it doesn’t leave.
The UoG takeover: Reading The World In 75 Years consisted of 6 readers; each reading an excerpt from a work published after 1949, that they feel has created an indelible dent in literature today. The first to be read was, “A Month in the Country.” presented by Mary Claire Chatman. Carr’s early life was shaped by failure and it is painfully, poetically reflected in his writings.
“We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours forever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.” Do we recognize happiness in the present moment or is it a condition we only perceive in retrospection, remembering the past through the rose-tinted glasses of memory? These are the questions reading literature begs us to ask! We have all felt the transformative touch that reading brings us. Read the world, and then let the world read you.
CREATIVE WRITING – UNBREAKABLE
Ten of the creative writing students performed their own pieces; available in the Anthology: Unbreakable. Laura Elsleys, “bedroom,” and Andrea Coxs, “betrayed,” just to name a few.
One of the many topics of conversation surrounding creative writing, is the very topic itself; what do I write? What can I write? The entire world would argue: anything! Which I can agree, but I can say with utmost certainty is that it is impossible to take yourself, your perception out of your writings. If you are a member of the human race you write about the world you live in, you cannot avoid it. It’s embroidered in the quilt of our society, it is unavoidable. As a feminist, ethnic, woman, I cannot, not, write as a feminist, ethnic, woman. You can’t take it out of me, or anyone.
People have a propensity to declare themselves a writer, but we are all writers. Listening to these talented students perform their own works brought me to the same conclusion; you do not have to be grand to be remarkable. Poetry and prose about the mundane, a quiet life, and normalcy can be just as ecovative as tragedy, action, and extraordinary. The creative writing students, authors, people that yield a pen, have an incredibly innate power to touch other’s hearts without knowing them, opening their mouth, or even existing at the same time.
Tom Bennett, chief editor of Unbreakable, (UoG Anthology) has been studying with the university since 2020 in the English Literature & Creative Writing joint degree and is now starting his phd.
Interviewing Tom Bennett:
NALANI: What got you into literature?
TOM: I don’t know, I just always liked reading when I was younger. I wrote a bit of poetry, and then realized I wasn’t really good at it, and then moved to prose; short stories. Now I am working on a full length novel for the phD.
NALANI: How did UoG shape you into the writer you are today?
TOM: I think it made me better as a writer instantly from the feedback I got from Duncan, Mike, and the other staff about my style and how I craft characters and thoughts. You can see the improvement almost straight away.
NALANI: Do you have a specific author that influenced your writing?
TOM: Cormac Mccarthy, I’m really interested in language and descriptions so he’s an obvious one to say. I think he is one author that has definitely shaped me. I try not to emulate authors too much, but I think he is a good one to aspire to and know you’ll never get anywhere near.
NALANI: You say you’re working on a Novel?
TOM: Yes, it is a postmodernist novel, so it fits the themes we have been talking about this evening. About kevin Carter; the photojournalist joining the Sudan war in the early nineties who commited suicide because he couldnt bare what hes seen as a war photographer. So the novel would be a depiction of his life and work
NALANI: Why do you do this?
TOM: I think literature is so crucial to shape us as people, to have us see the good and the bad in the world, and to act upon it. I can not pin down why I like writing, but I know I just do, and maybe that’s the point of a writer: they’re not really sure why, they just do it.