Tower and Town, November 2017

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Marlborough LitFest

It seems barely a year since Marlborough LitFest 2016 and alas, this year’s festival has been and gone all too quickly. Not only was this year’s literary spectacle diverse, absorbing and entertaining, it was at times challenging and provocative.

Authors, writers, editors, translators, commentators, political reporters and an off-duty paramedic gathered in various venues across town to: discuss, interview, inform, entertain and enlighten audiences from Marlborough and further afield. Some of this year’s highlights included the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner, Labour campaigner John O’Farrell, writer and television personality Will Self, children’s author Jason Beresford, writer and film maker Xiaolu Guo, novelist David Mitchell, and poet Kayo Chingonyi.

To launch the 2017 festival, children from local primary schools took part in a flashmob on the steps of the Town Hall, performing a dance sequence inspired by the famous children’s classic book, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. A wonderful buzz spread throughout the town over the festival weekend while people marvelled at the wonderful selection of books on display for sale in the Town Hall and at The White Horse Bookshop. As always, it was heartening to see so many children at the primary schools’ event on the Friday, and also at the storytelling sessions held in the library and at the bookshop.

Fortunately, I had the opportunity to hear the talks presented at St Mary’s Church Hall on the Saturday. Two talks in particular stood out for me – the first, Translation Duel with Rosalind Harvey and Daniel Hahn. This discussion focused on one particular text, Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, but also the complexity of language in general. If you are a translator, finding the right word to mirror an original sentence in a text, without losing perhaps the integrity, or humour, or sensitivity intended, is a mighty task! The talk emphasised the difficulty of language, inference and connotation, and how no two words can have an identical translated meaning. Xiaolu Guo was the other speaker who stood out for me. Her memoir, Once Upon A Time In The East talks about the struggles and constraints of language, identity and gender while growing up in China, and her escape to find freedom in the West. A truly interesting and inspiring woman whose previous work was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.

It was a wonderful festival, and one that homed in on current social and political issues. There were great discussions, questions and interviews and stories being told. Another successful year of literary magic.

Gabriella Venus