The Wanstead Book Festival, part of the Wanstead Fringe festivities, is once again hosting a wide range of talents and authors working in various styles, writes Giles Wilson
The link between places and memories is a subject we have covered in a couple of different ways during the years of the Wanstead Book Festival, not least through the work of E11’s resident psychogeographer, John Rogers.
So, it’s fitting that John will be kicking off this year’s book festival as he speaks to another local, Joanna Pocock, whose book Greyhound has just been published. It recounts a journey she made across America by bus and what she learned by repeating the trip 20 years later. She found a country that had become more atomised and on the brink of environmental calamity, but which nevertheless found her memories and experiences overlapping with each other.
A changing society is one Stephen Colegrave chronicles in his daily work as executive editor of independent media outlet Byline Times, and his major work on the history of Punk, which is to be published in the autumn, will remind people of how society was initially horrified but later came to embrace the ethos of punk. He will be speaking to Lord Victor Adebowale.
Tom Shakespeare is a distinguished thinker in the field of bioethics, often broadcasting on the BBC, but his current focus is rather softer – it’s a series of witty feel-good novels, the first of which was described by Alexander McCall Smith as “beautifully observed and highly entertaining.”
For years, Rory Cellan-Jones was a fixture on our TV screens as the BBC’s technology correspondent, and in fact, when he spoke at the Wanstead Book Festival three years ago, social media was the topic. Thanks to the very social media he observed, he has unexpectedly become one of the country’s most celebrated dog owners for the way he has gently coaxed his rescue dog, Sophie from Romania, out from behind the sofa into everyday life.
Alan Connor has yet to write about dogs, but he’s covered an incredibly varied range of subjects, including crosswords, quizzes, the shipping forecast and, recently, the huge range of words we have for rain. He’s a comedy writer, quiz guru and is also crossword editor for The Guardian. And as described by Rory Cellan-Jones, he is “the man with the contents of the Oxford English Dictionary stored just above his left eyebrow… and he’s quite funny too.”
These are just some of the speakers. And right in the middle of the festival is another family book day with three authors – Sophy Henn, Nima Patel and Crystal Sung – who will be engaging young readers, hoping they will come to love books as much as some of the adults around them do.
For more information on Wanstead Fringe events, visit wnstd.com/fringe
