Set yourself the goal of getting published in an inflight publication, one of the publications provided by airlines in the seat pockets in front of each passenger .

Many writers dream of getting featured in an in-flight magazine . Just imagine your feature article being read by travelers as they fly all over the globe . Many of those magazines will eventually find new homes – from coffee tables to banks to doctors’ waiting rooms – after passengers carry them away after their flights.

Why Write for In-flight Magazines?

There are several reasons why getting published in an in-flight magazine is a suitable objective for your writing career.

Firstly, there’s the exposure . Secondly, you will have an excellent publishing credit to add to your writing portfolio. Winning other high-paying assignments will become just that little bit easier. Finally , you will be paid well. Most inflight magazines pay very well, with many paying approximately a dollar per word.

Diverse Passengers, Diverse Topics

Don’t limit your article ideas to traditional travel writing. Although a lot of airline passengers are on vacation others travel for business or other reasons. Also, since passengers come from different walks of life in-flight magazines publish feature articles and departments on quite a wide range of topics . Their published material includes articles on travel and adventure, dining and entertainment, business, nature and the environment, and many other subjects .

Always rememberwhen pitching ideas to an inflight publication that the airline’s route destinations are critical. Every article needs to have a connection to the destinations and routes of the airline.

Did I Mention Competition?

There must be a catch, right ? Well, getting published in an in-flight magazine is not going to be a without serious competition . You won’t be the only freelance writer pitching your ideas to these busy editors . To suggest it will be highly competitive is probably an understatement.

Editors of in-flight publications demand a high quality of freelance work , and they usually prefer to work with freelance writers who have proven experience and professionalism.

In-flight Magazines Are Not For Beginners

How about if you have just starting out as a freelance writer ? Start somewhere else . Try targeting some local publications. After you have several pieces published start working your way up to regional magazines. As your portfolio grows you will eventually be ready to target inflight magazines and other leading publications.

Check out this huge list of In-flight magazines

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A year ago, the festival Jazz Britannia was such a success that the Barbican along with BBC Four are bringing to us this year, a 3 day festival which celebrates the evolution of British folk music from the end of the Second World War right up to its modern day revival. From the 2nd to 4th February ‘06, the Barbican holds a series of live events encompassing three themed concerts, free music, films and talks. Tying in with the event is BBC Four’s very special three-part documentary series of the same title that engages with the disparate and sometimes argumentative elements of the contemporary folk scene.

To kick off on Thursday 2nd February, Which Side Are You On? is a night that features two of the biggest names in folk music of the British Isles and will be hosted by the force that is, Billy Bragg. The monumental Scottish firebrand singer-songwriter Dick Gaughan, will take to the Barbican Hall stage alongside Martin Carthy, a mainstay of the English folk scene.

Daughters of Albion on Friday 3rd February brings together some of England’s finest female folk artists and singer-songwriters in a themed concert to sing songs of experience. The set list places ancient folk ballads alongside West Country trip hop and 21st Century R’n’B. All performances will be accompanied by an ensemble featuring ex-Pogue and master multi-instrumentalist David Coulter, guitarist Neil MacColl and Van Morrison’s drummer Liam Bradley, all arranged by MD Kate St John. Artists include June Tabor, Sheila Chandra and Norma Waterson.

The final night, Into The Mystic celebrates the current resurgence of interest in the psychedelic, mystical, neo-folk of the late 1960s and early 1070s. It explores how this renewed interest has been reflected on a new generation of artists today. It will feature artists from pioneer bands such as Pentangle, The Incredible String Band, Donovan and Vashti Bunyan.

Meanwhile, the BBC 4 series will be divided into three one hour episodes which chronicles how the music was coerced into a revolutionary soundtrack by the Left in the 50s, how the hippie generation bent it into progressive folk-rock in the 60s and 70s only for punks like The Pogues and Billy Bragg to bring things back to basics in the 80s and 90s. The story of folk will be told by a stellar cast of musicians, live performances and archive footage and the debates that arise in its argumentative world will be discussed.

www.barbican.org.uk/music

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Ken Loach is unassuming. His work has a richness and complexity, so often absent in modern movies, that marks a strongly humanist outlook on life and society – and yet, the films are shot in a guileless, almost documentary style allowing the audience to engage with the story and characters without any overt directorial signposting. He is the kind of artisan who brings an incredible amount of craft to their work; the kind that if you notice what they are doing, if any heavy-handedness intrudes, are not doing their job properly.
“The criterion always is to carry the story forward or reveal the character and just explore the content rather than just explore the narrative line.

“One thing is to cast people who have something in common, at least, with the part they’re playing and then they reveal themselves and they bring that depth into the films. That’s a key element and so that you try to suggest a hinterland beyond the film. It’s just a question of finding people who will have that depth and be able to reveal it and, if it works, brings a sense of a life beyond the film. That’s what you try for.”

Work of such depth is not made in isolation and Loach’s method of working relies heavily on collaborating with writers who share his humanist and political sensibilities. The writers (including Nell Dunn, Jeremy Sanford, Jim Allen and Paul Laverty) bring a strong sense of character, place and humour to the projects.

“I’ve been very lucky and worked with a few writers for a long time. The writer I’m working with the moment, Paul Laverty, and I and Rebecca [O'Brien, Loach's producer] will talk about what’s come out of the films we’ve done in the past, the last film, and then just talk around different ideas until one really seems the one that has to be made. It comes from long conversations with the writer. The writer is the most important person in the process, often more important than the director.”

His work comes from a long tradition of social realist cinema that, arguably, began in the forties with Italian Neorealism, continuing through aspects of the French nouvelle vague, through to the British new wave of the sixties which included the work of directors like Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger who dealt explicitly with the dissatisfaction and social problems within Britain. Beginning his career in television, Loach made a name for himself with the hugely innovative Cathy Come Home (1966) before moving into cinema with Poor Cow (1967) and particularly with Kes (1969) which for many remains his signature film. He continued to alternate his work between television and cinema throughout the seventies until he found himself marginalised during the eighties because his political viewpoint did not chime with the right-wing ideologies of Thatcherism. Although he was met with direct censorship, Loach refused to give up on his ideals.

“Films do, whether you want them to or not, interpret the world because you’re taking a picture of people and places. You are interpreting the world whether you want to or not, and if you’re going to interpret it then your interpretation should be, at least, coherent. Obviously, a film can be anything, a film is like prose, but if it’s to have any merit then I think that there must be some ideas that are reflected in what you do and then you have to test the validity of those ideas.”

Loach’s resurgence in the nineties, brought about by Channel 4 funding and producers Sally Hibbin and Rebecca O’Brien, has produced headline cinema; from Hidden Agenda through Riff-Raff, Land And Freedom, My Name Is Joe, and Bread And Roses, to last year’s Ae Fond Kiss; Loach’s films have garnered international prizes, critical accolades and commercial success. The uncompromising nature and integrity of his work has been bolstered by the integrity of the working relationships he has developed. And, although his films seem at odds with commercial cinema, his immediate future seems assured.

“All the films we’ve done have either made money or broken even and they are commercial enterprises, otherwise we wouldn’t survive. What we spend to make the film is linked to what we can get back either through the box office or sales to television or whatever. They are commercial projects and the budgets reflect what will be recouped.

“The people we have been working with, we’ve been working with a long time so it’s a well established pattern of finance, if we did two or three and they’d all lost heavily, well, we’d struggle. We’d be in trouble.”

The consistently high quality threshold that he maintains has helped him become one of World cinema’s respected elder statesman coupled with the bravery that sees him make films that are more complex than the norm. Generally, cinema is about winning, someone always has to win; there are obstacles in our hero’s path and they are overcome in a series of increasingly dramatic events culminating in an uplifting ending and a return to some kind of status quo (hopefully, not the denim-clad longhairs) leaving the audience little changed by the experience. Loach’s films are better than that because he knows that the world isn’t about winning or losing but the life that happens in between, that cinema can intelligently reflect and comment upon what is real rather than just being an expensive palliative.

“We try to explore just the way people live together and the interaction between social circumstances and private lives and the effects of politics on the way people live. It all interacts with the other; people don’t live in a vacuum, they live in a world determined by political and economic decisions that affects them down to the most private, the most inner part of their lives.”

Important British cinema is being made by relatively few people nowadays, the industry preferring either feel-good fare or variations on a gangster theme. Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Michael Winterbottom are the only British directors who consistently garner international praise and have refused the temptation to ‘go Hollywood’ – hopefully, to be joined by Shane Meadows and Lynne Ramsay – and while Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are often bracketed together, Loach’s projects are more political and immediate whereas Leigh’s fables tend to explore emotional ground more explicitly.

“I’ve known Mike a long time, he’s a friend – yes, I always enjoy his films. I think we do quite different films and present people in a different light. Although the films are often placed in a similar social milieu or similar locations, we’re interested in making different kinds of films; different kinds of statements. I think the similarity is more apparent than real.”

Ken Loach is in a World class of directors who continue to show that cinema can still have important things to say in an era when Hollywood, the dominant cinema in the world, seems to be ingesting itself in its quest for fatuousness.
“Writers have to write what they feel compelled to write and the same is true for filmmakers. I think European filmmakers, by and large, take a more complete view: their films reflect a more complete view of the world they experience.
“Because the American industrial cinema is so driven by formula, by how to maximise their profits, they turn film into hamburger. It’s equivalent to McDonalds, instead of being equivalent to a series of restaurants. Everything is geared to exploiting the markets rather than to making a relevant communication. So inevitably that has an impact on the kinds of films that it produces.
“I think that Asian cinema produces very complex films. Southern American cinema is very interesting and some of the most progressive films are coming from Southern America. So maybe North America should learn from Southern America for once.”

Ken is currently in post-production on his new film, The Wind That Shakes The Barley starring Cillian Murphy, looking at the Irish struggle for independence and the lead-up to the civil war of 1922.

“We’ve just finished the first cut and we’re just starting to go through and throw a lot of the stuff out. So, we’re just at quite a good stage of this … but when you’re close to it, it’s sometimes hard to say whether it’s any good or not. It may be a load of old rollocks. You never know.”
Unassuming. As ever.

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The Live8 concert in July this year, in London’s Hyde Park was set up to raise awareness about the Black continent issues, but before the first guitar riffs, the gig highlighted one single home truth: Africans should do it for themselves! The lack of performers from Africa in the initial line-up raised eyebrows on every side of the argument.

Cue Ligali, an east London organisation whose role is to monitor the media, act as complaint body, be active in the educational field and raise awareness on the issues that plague black communities up and down the country: gun crime, rebellion against authority, stop and search…On the same day, a day of African remembrance was staged at the Hackney Town Hall and the day-long event put together by Ligali is a “positive day to remember the struggle against slavery, our ancestors and their sacrifice in what is widely considered as an holocaust,”‘ according to Emma Pierre-Joseph, spokesperson for the organisation. She also told CEN Magazine that it is “a forward-looking day to provide a platform of reflection for the whole community and its future.”

The centrepiece of the event is the screening of a newly released DVD on the African slavery trade, the shameful human trade officially abolished in 1772 in the UK and its empire. Liverpool was the unofficial capital of the slave trade with more than 10 millions souls from the continent‘s west coast (Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal) transiting there, on their way to build the new continent, America. Other towns throughout Europe, shared that infamous tag Bordeaux, Nantes, Bristol in France, Lisbon in Portugal, Barcelona in Spain and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Winner already of the best documentary prize at the Pan-African film festival and Bridgetown film festival and with testimonies ranging among others, from Dr M. Karenga, Amira Baraka, Desmond Tutu, Dr Helena Woodward, Shaykh Muhammad Shareef and Trevor Marshall. The film, is a compelling compilation of testimonies, voices and opinions gathered around five continents and more than 20 countries on the subject. “‘We went to universities as well as into the neighbourhoods to talk to the common folk,” says Asante Jr, the talented scriptwriter and poet, who was a first year media graduate at the time when he started working on the project.

HIV/AIDS, crime, drugs, low expectation, and underdevelopment plague most people of African origin throughout the world. 500 years later, after slavery, colonialism, the cold war and subsequent neo-colonialism, daughters and sons of the continent are still suffering and cannot enjoy basic freedom or wealth. Told from the continent vantage-point, the film scrutinises the holocaust and subsequent uprooting of Africans from their homeland and culture. In the words of producer-director, Owen ‘Alik’ Shahadah, “500 Years Later chronicles the struggle of a people who have fought and continue to fight for the most essential human right: Freedom.”

Owen used to produce a stylish work of art and set up a website www.500yearslater.com to foster and further the debate, knowing that the film has already garnered interest from education bodies throughout the world, willing to use it as a teaching method.

That might be exactly what African communities in the UK need, as reveals Asher D, the rapper and member of the So Solid Crew collective in his subsequent Channel 4 documentary aired in November 2004, surfing on the same subject, but neighbouring issue of the ‘N word’ (nigger/ nigga).

“It’s definitely an issue that people of my generation don’t know enough about black history and that’s a point I raise throughout the programme.” He finishes with “when it comes to the teaching of black history, there is none” and for the first time, our rulers seem to agree with him, as Liverpool’s Riverside Labour MP Louise Ellman called for the Blair-Brown government to introduce teaching slave trade history in British schools and asked for a national day of remembrance. 117 MPs across the chamber joined her and settled for the debate to take place in the commons, during Black History month in October this year. However, on the question of responsibility, which could trigger lawsuits and potential reparations, the government washed its hands of the problem, stating that it “cannot take responsibility for what happened over 170 years ago” even if it recognizes that “the slave trade is one of the worst examples of man’s inhumanity to man” and added that it wasn’t an unlawful act at the time the British government condoned it. 500 Years Later the film’s sequel will be released in 2006, focusing on AIDS/HIV, the colonisation of the African continent, neo-colonisation, the ill-effects of globalisation with a chapter on Bretton-Woods institutions like the World Bank and the IMF.

The film has an obvious quality, for its combination of thoughtful photography signed by the director Owen, retrospective voices and using a multi-media platform to get its point across, which could see him becoming a benchmark in filmmaking history. Although filed with facts, it relies on a gripping narrative infused by the flavour and a soundtrack for poetical freedom and liberation. Showing the chains that tied their ancestors and contemporaries, it also offers a serious path outside of the plantations.

Scriptwriter, Asante Jr is a poet master with an interesting ability to transfer its art from the written/spoken word to the screen and his influence transpires throughout 500 years later. “To have people be so receptive and come up to us crying and embrace us after seeing the film is just amazing,” reveals Asante Jr. “We worked on the project for two and half years, and you just don’t know if people are going to like it; you are just going on passion and what you think is right.”

Right he surely was.

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Roger Corman’s B-movie factory of the sixties and seventies produced a number of leading film talents like Francis Ford Coppola,Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson and James Cameron who have become big cheeses in Hollywood. They’ve each created large niches for themselves and become marquee names whose presence will guarantee a following. Even more regular cheeses like Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovitch, and Monte Hellman have become known for their idiosyncratic visions and their adherence to signature styles. Graduates from the Corman studios tended to become iconoclasts, probably as a result of Corman’s high concept, high turnover approach forcing directors, writers and actors to think on the run and be brave with their decisions. Fellow Corman graduate, John Sayles has always been different – one of America’s best independent filmmakers, he has worked with genuine skill and clarity as a writer, director, editor, actor and script doctor for nearly 30 years. What separates John Sayles from his peers is his refusal to play out his work in terms of a simple hero/ villain morality, his refusal of the strictures of iconoclasm.

Silver Star, Sayles’ latest release due out in late July, is three films in one: a detective story reminiscent of Chinatown, a satirical look at the political and intellectual credentials of George W. Bush, and an indictment of the weakness of mainstream journalism in pursuing politicians and their paymasters. John takes us through his gallery of shady deal-makers, migrant Mexicans, leftist bloggers, cynics and the disaffected to delineate his vision of what really has gone wrong with the American political system, using an extraordinary cast headed by Danny Huston (who, after his performances in this and Ivansxtc, is as amiable as freshly buttered toast and should be in every American film made from here on in). The film feels like 70’s conspiracy thrillers in the vein of Winter Kills or The Parallax View with an overriding air of pessimism rather than paranoia – the bad guys can’t be caught, nothing really changes by the end of the film and the only victories are relatively minor human ones.

Silver Star flies in the face of prevailing Hollywood wisdom (leftist documentaries aside), being both political and not particularly heroic. Most, if not all, Hollywood films have a very simple structure: present the hero as someone in whom the hopes and ideals of the audience can be vested, introduce and play out a conflict that the hero must overcome, and finally see the conflict resolved. Simple. Except that life is rarely ever that simple, even if information is increasingly skewed to this model; witness the last Gulf War where first we see Bush and Blair as heroes fighting terrorism introducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction wielded by Sadam Hussain (the pre-eminent bad-guy of our times), secondly the exposition of this conflict through various media, and finally ‘shock and awe’ – roll credits. The good guys win, the bad guys are made to suffer, and we, the audience, are invited to cheer. The duplicity of this structure is that you either go with it or you refuse to suspend your disbelief, there is no active engagement with the scenario and no nuances to discuss or modify. John Sayles’ work displays exactly the opposite sensibility drawing on stories that are as much about the society in which they are based as they are about the people that inhabit them. His work tends to act as a social, political and emotional travelogue rather than a straight-line narrative. The films are all about nuance, all about the compromises that exist between individuals and the society in which they live; points of view being drawn richly, sympathetically and non-judgmentally (he mostly eschews didacticism in favour of letting the audience make up its own mind). Community and social mores emerge as lead characters in his stories and, since changing society is as difficult as twisting a melon, his stories tend to have downbeat or open-ended conclusions.

After graduating with a Psychology degree in 1972, Sayles worked in a series of blue collar jobs whilst penning short stories for magazines and working on novels. He eventually found work with Roger Corman as a writer, producing scripts for Piranha, The Lady in Red and Battle Beyond the Stars (all, quite frankly, derivative of other more successful films but fun with a nice line in characterisation), learning the rudiments of film-making along the way. Using the money saved from writing these films, he made his debut as a director with The Return of the Secaucus 7, a warm, dialogue-heavy comedy of character and connections whose story structure was followed three years later by Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill. The film was a critical success but not a commercial one and John went back to his day-job, writing scripts for films such as The Howling and Alligator (both of which are terrific monster movies, The Howling in particular being a witty and postmodernist update of the werewolf myth and just about the best werewolf film ever made) whilst raising money for his second film Lianna, dealing with issues of sexuality and its social and emotional fall-out. His first studio film, Baby It’s You, again showed Sayles’ ability to write wittily and incisively about personal and social issues with a story about a high school romance that falls apart in the post-school years because the social gulf between them is just too wide. Sayles never worked for a studio again because of arguments over the final cut of Baby It’s You.

His independence allowed him to make a string of American film classics exploring the emotional, social and political landscape of America working with a regular cast of actors including David Strathairn, Joe Morton, Chris Cooper and Gordon Clapp. The Brother from Another Planet looked at Harlem through the eyes of a mute alien on the run from bounty hunters, Matewan used a Western scenario to present a complex look at union politics, Eight Men Out presented the story of a sporting scandal in rich and illuminating detail, City of Hope used a multiple narrative to show the workings of a city bathed in compromise and on the edge of despair, Passion Fish showed the often fractious relationship between two very different women and earned a best original screenplay Oscar nomination, Lone Star distilled issues of community and race from an investigation into a 20 year old murder using multiple narrative and gained another Oscar nomination for best screenplay, Men With Guns was filmed entirely in Spanish and uncovered the harsh politics of an unnamed war-torn Latin American country, Limbo is a parable about three people trapped on an island tinged with ideas about the death of community, Sunshine State was another multiple narrative tale about a real estate development in Florida, and Casa de los Babys which was a study of six women who travel to South America in the hope of becoming adoptive mothers. In between films Sayles works as a script doctor, lending his intelligence to films like Apollo 13 and Mimic amongst others.

A john Sayles film has a ‘no bullshit’ guarantee, he strives as he scribes to find the emotional and intellectual truth in his material with dialogue that is pithy, witty and wise (and often all three at the same time). Like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, his films are heart-felt and humanist, although he tends not to involve caricature as much as Mike Leigh and works on a broader canvas than Ken Loach. Like Robert Altman, Sayles’ technique of using multiple narratives offer the opportunity of looking at a subject in different and sometimes contradictory ways but unlike Altman, whose approach produces a compendium of short stories, Sayles uses it more as a novelist would, to deepen and enrich the story. John Sayles may well be the most politically aware director working in America who has pursued his writing career with a blue collar work ethic. He is a true individual, telling complex stories with precision and, in turn, should be seen as a real icon.

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News From Nowhere: Visions Of Utopia promises to be one of the largest art events in London this year. A number of public sites in North East London, including The William Morris Gallery, the Changing Room Gallery, The Waltham Forest Theatre situated on an island and surrounded by a moat, Lloyd Park, and a massive building site in the centre of Walthamstow, The Vestry House Museum and Walthamstow Town Hall will be used as stages for exhibitions, interventions, installations, audio visual works, music performances and public art activities during September/ October 2005.

CarnegieBased on the title of the William Morris novel News From Nowhere, and set in and around his birth-place, the project aims to re-examine the legacy of utopianism: upheld by the idealists of the 19th and early 20th century, who believed passionately in the possibilities of radical social change, with visions of a future egalitarian world, it is a distant cry from our post-modern, post-ideological times.

An international line-up of artists, designers, musicians, writers, thinkers and performers will be presenting their work in the context of the various spaces. The events, works in progress and completed pieces will be documented and published on-line in the Visions of Utopia web site. The site will also provide a global forum for open contributions, reports and sightings of utopia.

A special limited edition newspaper, News from Nowhere will be published and distributed, including essays, documentation and interviews with local and global residents, as well as those of the participating artists and organisers. The 18th-century Water House, Morris’s family home from 1848-1856 is now the William Morris Gallery. It is the only public museum in the world devoted to this country’s best known and most versatile designer with internationally important collections illustrating Morris’s life, achievements and influence.

Art Utopia For the first time, a selected group of artists, designers and writers will be given a unique opportunity to place work within the House and permanent displays, resulting in a series of juxtapositions and interventions alongside the work of Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites; featuring the legendary Tony Benn, designers Ralph Ball and Maxine Naylor, architect Meredith Bowles, artists Stephen Williams, Liane Lang, Anderson Inge, Malcolm Barrett, Luis Gonzago Barriera Bras Keith Ball and Steve Wheeler. With sonic work by Isobel Jones and video performance from Claire Robins.

Other Venues
The Changing Room Gallery
Vestry House Museum
Arcadia (a massive building site)
Waltham Forest Theatre, The Moat, Lloyd Park

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‘Catalyst’ is a collaborative mix media project based around poems by London writer and visual artist Cat Miranda aka Cat Catalyst. Cat’s poetry explores spiritual and humanist concepts, embracing emotion and looking for a deeper meaning.

Choreographer Briar Adams creates the movement and composer Danbob Clarke contributes electronic beats, with lyrics by director Cat Miranda.

In addition to Cat Catalysts poetry, there are special guest appearances from active poets David J, Tim Wells, Ramshackle Event, Salina Saliva, Baden, Pom Pom Poets and more.

Rhythm Factory
16-18 Whitechapel Road
London E1 1EW
020 7375 3774

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East London Metropolitan Opera continues to bring together top professional musicians with members of the local community and children from Hackney schools accompanied by a full orchestra.

For those with more contemporary, independent tastes, a hip triple bill on the 13th July with Billy Childish and the Buff Medways, Ed Harcourt and Paul The Girl, is not to be missed. A cult figure in America, Europe and Japan, Billy Childish is arguably the most prolific painter, poet and songwriter of his generation. In a twenty-year period he has published 30 collections of his poetry, recorded over 90 full-length independent LP’s and produced over 2000 paintings. High praise comes from Alternative Press, USA, “Of all the ’70s punk survivors Childish is one of the select few who didn’t sell out, or end up sucking.” Whilst Time Out describes Billy as “terse, gutsy and powerfully humane.” Ed Harcourt, reviewed by the Observer Music Monthly, has been praised also, “the blissful sound of a besotted drunk in love…Harcourt retains a composer’s eye for detail which repays whatever attention you care to give it.” British artist, Paul The Girl is an admired and accomplished musician; The Guardian review wrote,”…on her own tiny label, Paul is making the most original music of any British artist, of either gender.” Spice festival goers will be spoilt for choice with the line-up of drama performances. From Cardboard Citizens; an clectic mix of theatre, circus and music developed and devised by This Way Up, the UK’s largest arts performance programme for homeless people, to Rajni Shah Theatres’ story of Queen Elizabeth I, a traditional Indian bride and according to the synopsis, “…the relationships we have to the land we live on, and the theatres we all invent.”

Let’s not forget the little people for whom the Movingstage Marionette Company bring double bill, Captain Grimy and The Three Little Pigs, a charming puppet show re-telling these familiar, timeless tales. Also presented by Spice Festival is Richard Pinner, Gold Star BAFTA award winner who will be performing, “excellent close-up magic,” as described by The Stage.

The diverse drama available includes internationally renowned theatre company Rotozaza presenting their unique and innovative acts without any rehearsal. Actors perform by following live instructions. ROMCOM or The Distance Love Can Be Maintained Between Any Two Fixed Points, by Glen Neath is performed by two unprepared actors with headphones telling them what to say and do. The Glasgow Herald likens it to,”…one of Godards movies…as well as comedy it’s a complex study of compatibility and communication.”

2005 Events

Opera Gala Evening:
Hackney Empire:
Tuesday 12th July: 8pm, Tickets: £8, concessions £2.50

Billy Childish and The Buff Medways, Ed Harcourt, Paul The Girl:
Hackney Empire:
13 July: Doors 8.15pm Tickets: £10, conc. £7.50

Cardboard Citizens:
Acorn Theatre:
Thursday 21st July: 7.30pm

Rotozaza:
Hackney Empire:
17th July: 3pm: Tickets: £12/£8

Rajni Shah Theatre:
Acorn Theatre: Sunday 24th July: 4pm & 7.30pm: Tickets:£10/ £7

Movingstage Marionette Company:
Acorn Theatre:
16th July. 11am & 2pm: Tickets:£6, children £4.50.

Richard Pinner:
Bullion Theatre:
Sunday 24th July: 2.30pm: Tickets: £6 children, £4.50.

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There are six awards in total – five category awards (Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s) and, from these, one overall winner – the Whitbread Book of the Year.

Ali Smith Won Whitbread Novel Award 2005 for her work The Acceidental.

This year the awards attracted 476 entries – the highest total ever – and included a record number of entries in the Biography and First Novel categories with 114 and 80 books submitted respectively. Each category’s shortlist was chosen by a panel of judges, who this year included writer and broadcaster John Humphrys; authors Philippa Gregory, Margaret Drabble and Linda Newbery; comedy writer and performer Arabella Weir and CBBC children’s presenter Lizo Mzimba.

Since the introduction of the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won seven times by a novel, three times by a first novel, four times by a biography, five times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book.

Novel Award
Renowned writer Ali Smith won the Whitbread Novel Award 2005 for her first full-length novel The Accidental. It is the portrayal of a 12-year-old girl. Astrid is spending the summer in a holiday home with her family in Norfolk. It is a substandard house in a substandard town and she knows for sure nothing is going to happen there all substandard summer. So she starts filming the dawn breaking each morning on her Sony digital camera. Essentially a modern-day reworking of Pasolini’s 1968 film Theorem, this remarkable novel is at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark.

About The Accidental, Whitbread Award judges said: “This extraordinary novel of family life combined humour, sadness and mystery with a wonderful linguistic playfulness and invention.”

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Her first book, Free Love, won the Saltire First Book Award. She is also the author of Like (1997); Other Stories And Other Stories (1999); Hotel World (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Encore Award, the East England Arts Award of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002; The Whole Stories and Other Stories (2003) and The Accidental (2005). Ali Smith also writes for the Guardian, the Scotsman and the TLS.

First Novel Award
Tash Aw wins the Whitbread First Novel Award for his novel The Harmony Silk Factory. It is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley’s most prominent families; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loves Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era.

Tash Aw was born in Taipei and brought up in Malaysia. A graduate of the University of East Anglia, he now lives in London. He began his career writing short stories. Citing his influences as Flaubert, Faulkner and Nabokov, he is now writing his second novel.

Book of the Year Award
Biographer Hilary Spurling has won the prestigious 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year award for the second part of her masterful biography of Matisse, Matisse the Master, a work which took her 15 years to complete. The announcement was made on 24 January at an awards ceremony held at The Brewery in Central London.

Matisse the Master, published by Hamish Hamilton, is the fifth biography to take the overall prize. Claire Tomalin was the last author to win the Whitbread Book of the Year with a biography taking the prize in 2002 for Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.

Since the introduction of the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won seven times by a novel, three times by a first novel, four times by a biography, five times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book.

Biographer Hilary Spurling was born in Stockport, England, in 1940. Educated at Somerville College, Oxford, she was arts editor, theatre critic and subsequently literary editor for The Spectator during the 1960s. She is a regular reviewer for The Observer and the Daily Telegraph.

Her first book was a biography of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, published in two volumes in 1974 and 1984. She is also the author of a biography of the novelist Paul Scott and of the painter Henri Matisse, published in two volumes in 1998 and 2005. The latter volume, Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954 (2005) won the 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

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The Sugar Wife tells the story of four characters, the main one being Hannah Tewkley, the wife of a sugar and tea merchant in Dublin. As Quakers (a religion of non-violence) she and her husband Samuel welcome into their home, Alfred Darby, a philanthropist, and Sarah Worth, a former slave, who now gives lecture tours. The play deals with the efforts the characters made to live in a world that demands compromise to survive.

How did the play come about?
I was interested in taking the Quakers as a community to write about, a slightly different take on Irish history. I was also interested in ideas about slavery… because the tea and coffee business was very much connected with sugar, which was a slave produce and I thought there might be something interesting to explore there. The idea of a couple who were wealthy and acquiring wealth, who were very high-minded but somehow also compromised by the trade they were involved in. I thought that it might connect with the Celtic Tiger and the huge change in the racial make-up of Dublin where this is a totally new thing in Irish culture, suddenly there is a lot more cultural diversity.

What about the female characters?
I was interested in the idea of someone losing their faith and it was also about someone awakening in many ways -awakening to a recognition that things aren’t black and white – there is a more complex interplay between good and evil forces, and that reflects on Hannah’s own sexuality as well.
Sarah Worth (the former slave) tells the story of her ancestors and what happens on the slave ship (when half the slaves were thrown overboard and murdered) based on the true case of an infamous ship called the Zong, which was instrumental in bringing about the abolition of slavery because people were so horrified by the story, and that real atrocity. The style of the telling is fictionalised.
The issues in the Sugar Wife seem to be coming from a place of Post-colonial anxiety?

Post-colonial anxiety is something that one feels quite acutely as an English person living in Dublin. Of course, you’re feeling a level of guilt or pain about an imperial past, the wrongs of history. You can’t be an English person living in Ireland for that amount of time without thinking about those issues. It might be why I was attracted to writing about this Quaker community, because they are a people who left England to try to escape persecution. It was easier for me to take that perspective, as an outsider than for an Irish person living in Ireland, a feeling of being an outsider from the mainstream culture.

Soho Theatre and Writers’ Centre
21 Dean Street
London, W1D 3NE
www.sohotheatre.com

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