Community Centre & Art Gallery
Events
Katie Hale
The Edge of Solitude
The Old Courthouse, Shap
Tuesday 10th September 7.30pm
Katie will read from The Edge of Solitude, and talk about the process of writing the novel – followed by a Q&A and book signing.
Donations for The Old Courthouse appreciated.
In Katie Hale’s new novel, The Edge of Solitude, a lone ship journeys south, heading for the furthest reaches of Antarctica. It belongs to Sky, the billionaire behind a groundbreaking project to salvage the region. On board is disgraced environmental activist Ivy Cunningham, lending her expertise in the hope it might rescue her reputation – and perhaps even mend her broken relationship with her son.
And yet, as the ship moves ever deeper into the breathtaking but eerie landscape, Ivy grows increasingly suspicious. If she could leave, she would – but she knows there’s no way home.
Set in a time of acute climate crisis, The Edge of Solitude is a powerful story about the collision of ambition and principle and its devastating repercussions.
‘Powerful, authoritative, atmospheric and wise’ – Joanne Harris
‘Fascinating, immersive and brilliantly poised… We don’t have enough books like it!’ – Molly Aitken
Based near Shap, Katie Hale is a novelist and poet. She won a Northern Debut Award for her poetry collection, White Ghosts, and is a former MacDowell Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, Munster Chapbook Prize and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, and she has held residency posts in seven countries. In 2022, she won a Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction to work on The Edge of Solitude.
Gillian Allnutt
Biography
The Old Courthouse, Shap
Saturday 12th October 7.00pm
An Evening with Gillian Allnutt and Shap Writers,
Admission £5
When Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2016, Carol Ann Duffy wrote that her work ‘has always been in conversation with the natural world and the spiritual life.’
To date she has published nine collections, including How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007); indwelling (2013); and wake (2018), all from Bloodaxe Books. She has also published Berthing: A Poetry Workbook (NEC/Virago, 1991) and was co-editor of The New British Poetry (Paladin, 1988).
Her collections Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel (both from Bloodaxe) were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award in 2005 and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010.
Besides being a writer she has worked as a performer, publisher, journalist, freelance editor – and teacher. This year she celebrates fifty years of teaching in one context or another, working with students ranging in age from six to ninety-six years old! She has twice held Royal Literary Fund Fellowships – at Newcastle and York Universities. In 2009/10 she undertook a writing residency with The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom From Torture) in the North East, working with asylum seekers in Newcastle and Stockton. In 2013/14 she taught Creative Writing to undergraduates on the Poetry and Poetics course in the English Department of Durham University.
She was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle and now lives – ‘in voluntary exile’ as she says – in a former pit village in Co Durham.
You can pay at the door on the evening of the event of book online below.
