West Port Book Festival 2010 Outro
The third West Port Book Festival is finished and after a cup of tea, a mild amount of clearing up and a greasy spoon, we’ve almost put West Port back to ‘normal’.
We’re delighted with how West Port III has gone, our best yet*. We had a record number of packed venues, ate more cakes than ever before and celebrated a few notable firsts: our collective nouns Twitter application came to fruition with the collective nouns illustration competition, with superb accompanying event by Stuart Kelly.
We enjoyed a trilingual conversation with German Gaelic actor and editor Mìcheal Klevenhaus; we expanded our classical obsession into a whole packed afternoon, and partied hard last night at one of our new venues, the Roxy.
Our bookbinding strand, always enticing, flourished this year with master classes in the finer skills of the craft as well as ever popular workshops, whilst our Broons Appreciation night, a hilarious mixture of tweed caps, whisky, Broons bingo and rhyming couplets, proved that Saturday night at West Port can be a night that you do remember.
We also welcomed our mystery guest, comic book artist Frank Quitely, who endeared himself to us all by offering to carry stools and illustrating our back stairs with a fine sketch of Superman.
We were excited to have some exclusive book previews, Ken MacLeod’s The Restoration Game, Stuart Kelly’s Scott-land and Kei Miller’s A Light Song of Light. Copies will be available until Thursday. Email Hannah (hannah@westportbookfestival.org) if you’d like to purchase a book (or two).
If you couldn’t make it, or would like to relive it, then Colin Fraser has been working with lightening speed to produce podcasts from this year’s festival. Some are available already: http://westportbookfestival.org/podcasts
Chris Scott (chrisdonia on Flickr), he with the exciting hair, has been capturing our souls and shiny faces at a number of events. You can browse his WPBF photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisdonia/ Here's one of our favourites by Chris from the Found Footage event, held in another new venue, St Mark's ArtSpace, in collaboration with Screen Bandita, featuring poets Mia Gallagher and Jay Bernard, artist Izzy Bocchetti and musician Vroni Holzmann.
All that remains is for us to thank you all, dear readers and supporters, cake bakers and event attenders, for your enthusiasm, participation and encouragement. We hope you enjoyed this year as much as we did.
Photos by Chris Scott with the exception of the Broons photo (Nicola Hopper) and the Superman photos (Kay Bohan). 
Posted by Kayleigh Bohan on June 29, 2010.