Tag: Stoke Newington Literary Festival

  • Stoke Newington Literary Festival – preview

    Sara Pascoe
    Comedian Sara Pascoe

    Now in its seventh year, the Stoke Newington Literary Festival returns this weekend with a big focus on local writers and publishers, music and food.

    Some of the highlights from this year’s programme include Hackney writer Dawn Foster, who will be discussing her book Lean Out at 3pm on Saturday 4 June in the Unitarian Chapel.

    The book looks at the rise of what it sees as a corporate ‘one per cent’ feminism that exempts business from any responsibility for changing the position of women in society.

    Local independent publishers Influx Press are to stage author readings from An Unreliable Guide to London, comprising 23 stories about the lesser known parts of the city.

    On Saturday evening, one of the festival’s music highlights sees ex-Ruff Sqwad grime MCs Roachee and Prince Owusu talk to writer Kieran Yates at 6pm in Ryan’s Bar.

    Then at 11am on the Sunday, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance – the artistic and intellectual movement that kindled a new black cultural identity in 1920s New York – is the subject of a memorial event for Eric Walrond, one of only two writers buried in Abney Park cemetery.

    Fifty years after Walrond’s death, his biographer James Davis flies over from the US to talk to Diane Abbott MP, Colin Grant and Hackney writer Robin Travis about the writer’s profile in the UK and his work with Marcus Garvey.

    On Sunday afternoon, Observer journalist Jude Rogers talks to punk musicians Gina Birch, Pauline Murray, Shanne Bradley and Helen Reddington about the impact of punk on women at 1pm in Abney Hall.

    Shortly afterwards, the co-founder of the Quietus music website John Doran will join author Simon Mason in The Prince pub to talk about his experience of why the music business and drugs seem inextricably linked – one of the big topics of his 2015 memoir Jolly Lad from Hackney publisher Strange Attractor.

    Alongside local writers and publishers, the festival also features a few big names: comedians Sara Pascoe and Robin Ince will be lighting up Stoke Newington Town Hall on the Saturday night, and novelists Jonathan Coe and David Mitchell will close the festival on Sunday from 4pm.

    There are also a tonne of food events in St Paul’s Church. Weekend ticket holders can nab limited spots on a walking tour of Hackney bakeries, as food writer Xanthe Clay introduces gozleme and baklava experts at Hackney’s Turkish and Kurdish bakeries from 12.30pm on Saturday.

    Perhaps the most curious event on the bill is a food panel featuring Stoke Newington resident Ed Balls. The former shadow chancellor will be appearing at St Paul’s on the Sunday, where anecdotes about sandwich faux-pas on the campaign trail will presumably give audience members much to chew on.

    Stoke Newington Literary Festival
    3– 5 June
    stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com

  • Still Angry? John Barker on the Angry Brigade and his new novel Futures

    Writer John Barker
    Writer and former Angry Brigade member John Barker. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

    On 20 August 1971, John Barker was arrested during a police raid on number 359 Amhurst Road. He was detained by a specialist unit, the Bomb Squad, which had been set up at the start of the year with the express purpose of laying hands on him and the organisation he was part of, the Angry Brigade, which was linked to 25 bombings of MPs’ homes, government buildings and company offices between August 1970 and August 1971.

    One person was slightly injured by an Angry Brigade bomb, but no one was killed. According to police reports, there was a fair-sized arsenal in the Amhurst Road flat, including three guns, ammunition, sticks of gelignite and detonators to set them off. Barker was put on trial with seven associates – ‘the Stoke Newington Eight’ – at which it was argued that the group had conspired to cause explosions only for publicity purposes, not to harm anyone.

    Supported by the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Committee (“a widely-based, politically creative organisation of very different people,” several of whom had legal expertise), Barker, like fellow-accused Hilary Creek and Anna Mendelson, opted to defend himself. He says he was better at fighting his corner in the courtroom than he ever was at being an urban guerrilla, and going to Cambridge possibly helped.

    Barker studied English at Clare College, Cambridge, and his old supervisor, John Newton, spoke up for him at the trial. Barker never sat his finals exams, however: along with six other students, he tore up the paper in a “quixotic protest” against elitism. “It was because – and I still think this is the case – that the education system, increasingly so, is one basically that excludes. And the function of exams, in the class system, is one of exclusion. And I don’t regret it.”

    He doesn’t regret the Angry Brigade’s use of violence, either. “It’s not a moral question is it? It’s, you know, did it do anything strategic? Obviously you don’t want to hurt people. In the Angry Brigade trial it was proven over and over again that we wanted to cause damage to property but not to people.

    “I’m totally against terrorism as I understand it which is indiscriminate killing.”

    Nowadays, Barker works as a book-indexer and writer. His new novel, Futures, follows ‘City gents’ Phil and Jack as they plot to set up a cocaine futures market, pitting their analytical skills against understated psychopathic gang-master Gordon Murray, who has a line in Commercial Road wine-bars and softish-core Iranian porn.

    Set in 1987, one year after Thatcher government deregulation unleashed the ‘Big Bang’ on the City of London, the book experiments with the kind of levelling attitude a life spent around money can engender, one which takes a wide view of the world but reduces events to a single point of significance. Its analyst characters, according to Barker, “are in a very ruthless way looking at what changes the price of things, and it makes no difference to them whether that’s people getting killed in a mine in South Africa or some shift in American monetary policy – they look at it all in the same way.”

    Barker classifies Futures as a “dark comedy”, stripping the glamour off money and drugs. The story alternates between a third-person narration and a first-person view from behind Murray’s eyes. “I wanted his voice in particular because I think he’s a bore,” says Barker. ‘He’s really boring, not only unromantic but the way he kind of mimics neo-liberal language.” Murray is professional, self-controlled, but “in the end, a bit of a panicker”, a sort of gangland mirror of financiers in 1987, which included, in October, the panicked crash Black Monday.

    Barker followed such events devotedly in the Financial Times, whenever he was able to persuade the group of ‘nutcases and gangsters’ he shared a prison wing with to vote to have it as their paper of the month.

    As well as writing, Barker is also collaborating with the Austrian artist Ines Doujakon on art and performance work Loomshuttles/Warpaths, telling the story of textiles and colonialism over the last 1000 years, and showing this summer at the Sao Paulo Biennale.

    He looks back on the Angry Brigade years with “critical respect”: “My respect about it is the commitment and the anger, that I still feel and probably even more so.

    “Critical in that we didn’t change anything much. And I suppose it wasn’t very democratic politics.”

    The current political situation is, he says, “horrible”. “At a subliminal level, there’s this whole thing, all across Europe, that the poor have had it too good. Elites are always going on about ‘yes, you know welfare’s too soft,’ or this and that are too soft.” He’s critical too of the accompanying idea that ‘the Chinese are coming’: “There’s always this implication that there is a threat from Asia, so we need to adopt Asian values, Asian wage-levels, and we’re too soft and we can’t compete; which I think is by and large a nonsense because they’re not looking at what’s going on in Asia, where you have huge levels of class-struggle going on.”

    The fight today is about the particular, the unfungible: “The people I admire now are people who at an everyday level are fighting to keep nurseries open, or actually, you know, battling against real substantial cuts – that very unglamorous political work is the most important.”

    This is the small scale, un-regarded work which world-bestriding views tend not to notice, be they global capitalist or those of classical Marxism.

    John Barker will be speaking at The White Hart, Stoke Newington High Street on Sunday 8 June at 2pm, as part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival.

    Win two free tickets to the event by answering correctly the following question: 

    In the 1970s, the Angry Brigade firebombed a building where Stoke Newington Bookshop now stands. What was there before it was bombed?

    A – a launderette B – Barclays Bank C – James Preston Butcher D – a church

    Send your answers to info@stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com

     

  • Everyday Sexism founder Laura Bates: ‘I wanted to force people to see how bad the problem was’

    Everyday Sexism's Laura Bates
    Fighting against gender inequality: Everyday Sexism’s Laura Bates

    Did your education and home life make you aware of sexism and gender inequality at an early age? 

    No, it’s something I wasn’t particularly aware of at all until relatively recently. I was a debater at school so I was vaguely exposed to those kinds of ideas but it wasn’t until after university that I became really aware of feminism.

    What was the trigger that led you to start the Everyday Sexism Project

    It was just a really bad week where loads of incidents happened to occur within a really short space of time. One of them was a man who followed me off the bus all the way home, sexually propositioning me and refusing to take no for an answer. Another was a man on a bus who started groping and stroking my legs. I was on the phone to my mum and stood up and said “I’m on the bus and this man’s groping me,” but everyone else just looked out the window. It sent such a strong message to me that this is just the way things are. Then I was walking past a couple of guys working on a construction lorry and one of them said “Look at the tits on that”. If those things hadn’t happened so close together I would never have thought twice because it would have been so normal. And that’s what made me think.

    What action did you take from there?

    From there I started talking to other women. Because one of the common responses is that you doubt yourself. So I started asking other women ‘have you ever experienced anything like this?’ and I could not believe their responses. It was every woman I spoke to, and it was hundreds of stories, so I suddenly felt completely overwhelmed by how bad the problem was, that people had this really massive sense of ‘don’t make a fuss it’s not a big deal, women are equal now and sexism doesn’t exist’ and that made it really difficult to talk about. So very simply I started the website to put all these stories in one place, to try and make people realise how bad it still was. 

    How did the project evolve? 

    Initially it was mostly about awareness raising. I wanted to force people to see how bad the problem was and I wanted to provide a safe online space for women where their stories could be believed for the first time, and where I could create a sense of solidarity and of being part of a community, so you know it’s not your fault and you’re not alone. But it grew so quickly that it became something I hadn’t anticipated. Because it had been in the press so much, and because we had built up such a strong social media following, it was able to develop into more of a campaigning tool. So we were able to campaign to change Facebook’s policies on rape and domestic violence content, and work with the British Transport Police on an initiative called Project Guardian, which has increased the reporting of sexual offences by 25 per cent on public transport. We’ve also been able to take what we started online into the community to try and create real concrete change. I’ve been spending a lot of time going into schools and universities, talking to young people about the issues, working with politicians and using real women’s voices and stories to influence their decisions. 

    How important is it for gender equality to be introduced in a meaningful way in schools? 

    I think it’s absolutely vital. If I could name one thing that I think could make a concrete difference it would be for it to be part of the curriculum in schools, for children in schools to be learning about gender equality but also about ending violence against women, about very simple principles like what consent means and what a healthy relationship looks like. There is a real lack of understanding about these most basic principles. I talked to teenage girls who say they regularly hear the boys in their year using phrases like rape is a compliment really or it’s not rape if she enjoys it. So why we aren’t giving young people the tools to find a way through this to deal with this kind of bombardment I just don’t understand. 

    What will you be talking about at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival?

    I’ll probably be talking about the new Everyday Sexism book which basically grew out of a desire to reach a wider audience and hopefully raise awareness among some people who may not have seen the project online. We had reached this point where we had 60,000 entries sent in from women around the world. No one has time to sit down and read all of them so the book distills and crystallises all that information into a kind of snapshot; an overview of what women are dealing with now in 2014. Unlike the project website, the book separates entries thematically, so it looks at what women are dealing with in public spaces, in the media, in education, in politics, in the home, and it looks at kind of different aspects and areas of the problem and how closely interconnected they are. 

    In 1914 Sylvia Pankhurst established the East London Federation of Suffragettes in Bow. A hundred years on, what further changes to public life need to be made so that men and women are equal? 

    I think the media have a massive impact in terms of public life and public sentiment and have a large part to play. This is in part because of how the media objectify women. Seeing women, for example, on page three sends such a very clear message to young people growing up about the role of women in society, the way we should look at and treat them. Secondly, it’s the way the media portray women in public life, so regardless of the reason why they are in the news we still hear about what women look like and whether or not they’re sexy, whether it’s Amanda Knox being described as Foxy Knoxy, or whether it’s Reeva Steenkamp being flashed on the front page of the Sun in her bikini the morning after she was killed. So I think the perception of women in public life is hugely influenced by the media but I also think it’s about increasing the representation of women in politics, in business, throughout public life in areas like science and technology, and giving them that visibility as role models so that little girls growing up can look up and say I could be that because she’s doing it. 

    Hackney is a borough linked to Mary Wollstonecraft, regarded by many as the first feminist. But the word ‘feminist’ doesn’t seem to appear often in your writing – is the word ‘feminism’ no longer useful in the fight for equality? 

    It’s not a word that I use constantly perhaps because I think there’s a real pragmatism and sense of urgency and action about this new wave of activism, this new wave of feminism, and for young people particularly I think it’s quite accessible because they see an issue, they see how it impacts them, and they feel able to stand up and take action on it. They don’t necessarily feel that they have to be signing up to a big ideology, they don’t necessarily feel like it has to be academic or something that they’ve read books about. And I think that’s a powerful and positive thing. But  I always feel quite hopeful that the word feminism, in its simplest meaning of believing everyone should be equal regardless of their sex, is having a come back. 

    Everyday Sexism is published by Simon & Schuster UK. RRP: £14.99. ISBN: 9781471131578 

    Stoke Newington Literary Festival
    6-8 June, Various N16 venues

    Everyday Sexism 155