From Edinburgh's Soho to Scotland's Poetry Capital! StAnza: Scotland's International Poetry Festival, now in its thirteenth year, began its cracking programme of events on Wednesday and continues until Sunday in St Andrews. If we had an office, it would be missing some people this weekend.
We have invited 15 enterprising, exceptional artists to illustrate new collective nouns that have been collected by All-Sorts.org, a linguistic experiment that is taking the web by storm.
A huge thank you to everyone who has donated money to this year's book festival. Every donation is very much appreciated and goes directly towards our essential costs. We have raised nearly £1.000 so far and with a little more help should be able to programme another entertaining festival this year.
As promised, we're going to start releasing audio extracts from this year's West Port Book Festival. To get you warmed up, here are some audio tweets courtesy of our podcasting guru, Colin Fraser.
Thanks to everyone who took part in our charity raffle. We've now sent READ International a cheque and a rather natty card.
The book festival is over and our raffle is drawn. John Hegley and Tim Turnbull did the honours on Sunday night, although they forgot a few so I also asked William, of Edinburgh Books fame, to draw the remaining prizes on a blustery Monday morning. Here are the winners....
The Concise Ceilidh runs from 2pm on Sunday 16th August to an unspecified time. It may also decamp to the pub from its original starting point at Main Point Books. Intense speculation has surrounded this event. What is it? Well, all is revealed.
If you think that Roman poets are last millenia's news, think again. Political fun-poking, racy references and a fine sense of humour: Gaius Valerius Catullus has it all. Read on to find out more about the brilliant 'Irish Catullus' project that we'll be hosting at this year's festival.
As you may know, we're holding a Literary Twestival on Friday 14th August as part of our book festival. We are all very excited about the games and challenges that we'll be playing through twitter, coining collective nouns, passing the plot and writing some very, very short fiction. However, because we don't do enough for charity (ha!), we'll also be holding a charity raffle in aid of READ International, a brilliantly dynamic young charity.
