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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Books Living Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
The Hay Festival has just ended. It is an annual literary event that is now sponsored by the Sunday Times. The festival, held from 28 May to 6 June, derives its name from the picturesque town of Hay-on-Wye on the Hertfordshire and Welsh border, a place reknowned for its book shops.
The programme of the events is very impressive, with world-class writers participating, giving lectures, talking about the progress of their writing and answering readers' questions. The festival's guest of honour this year was the American writer Tom Wolfe whose recently published novel A Man in Full created a sensation in America. I dealt with the novel in one of my previous columns.
Wolfe appeared at the festival on 5th and 6th June and was awarded the 1999 Sunday Times Award for literary excellence. According to an American critic, Wolfe knocked down doors for a whole generation of American journalists and proved you can be weird and elegant and right all at once.
A number of leading authors, P D James, William Trevor, Ian McEwan and others, explained why good writing matters and how they achieved this at various venues in the town. One interesting item in the special issue of the Sunday Times' book section that accompanies the festival is by Magnus Mills, the London bus driver who quit his job to pursue a writing career. In this article he explains how on December 29 1998 after doing a on-rounder from Streatham to Baker Street and back he went to see a guv in his office and resign. Mills' novel, The Restraint of Beasts, was by then short-listed for Booker prize.
Harold Pinter, the famous playwright was one of the speakers at Hay. In the Books section he contributes a short poem entitled "Requiem for 1945". The Festival, however, was not devoid of political discussions. John Mortimer, the playwright recently knighted by Labour, turned his back on Tony Blair's government, according to the Sunday Times. Mortimer, known for poking fun at the Tories in his books Titmuss Regained and Paradise Postponed, is now accusing the Labour Party of promoting 'old conservatism' and called on Blair to drop the New Labour tag and simply revert to what most people want --Labour.
Another contribution to the Festival which gave it a political flavour was the participation of F W de Klerk, the South African president and Nobel laureate. There was also a series of political discussions about land, the Bosnia and war in the Balkans as well as a lecture given by Christopher Hitchens whose recent book, No One Left to Lie To, castigated the Clinton Presidency.
William Trevor, who was recently awarded the prestigious David Cohen prize, traces in an article his interest in writing from the time he was a school boy writing compositions on "A Wet Afternoon" until he has now become one of the leading novelists in England. He explains how he was influenced by such writers as Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemmingway and John Steinbeck.
Discussing the fact that fiction can be autobiographical, he writes: "Memory hovers over the past like a figure with a metal detector on a used up beach. Yet far more of fiction's raw material comes out of nowhere."
