The 2022 Clapham Book Festival is all but over. It began on a gloriously sunny autumn day on 9th October, walking around the Common on the Literary Trail, something which was repeated this Saturday last. It was a lovely day again, but, as the walk neared its end, the sky grew black. People dispersed and I headed for home to change for my afternoon session when the heavens opened. I got soaked through.
Undaunted, I dried, changed and strode off for Omnibus Theatre where the team had already gathered. Books were laid out for sale, mainly those written by Abir Mukherjee, with a few of mine too. This was the first afternoon session, which began at 3 pm. Abir was
tremendous, a joy to interview, in that he has a huge fund of anecdotes and amusing tales which makes life very easy for the interviewer. He grew up in Hamilton, just outside Glasgow to Bengali parents and talked about schooldays tribalism – ‘Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?’ ‘I’m a Hindu.’ Silence, followed by, ‘Yes, but are you a Catholic Hindu or a Protestant Hindu?’. The hour flew by and there was little time for questions, but everyone was entertained and impressed. The books practically flew off the counter, all signed by Abir.
Given that I had been working since ten o’clock that morning, I took a rest and didn’t go in to see Dame Jenni Murray, in conversation with Elizabeth Buchan, but members of the sizeable audience seemed very appreciative as I took in flowers and chocolates for the participants. The contents of the book table, meanwhile, had been swapped over, to hold Dame Jenni’s and Elizabeth’s books, which were being bought with enthusiasm.
The cafe/bar at Omnibus had been packed all afternoon, not just with Festival goers, but also a ‘New Mums n’ Dads’ club meeting, but this ended by about five thirty, which was a relief, as we knew we had a completely full house that evening for Sir Antony Beevor and Dr Piers Brendon. The Cafe/bar is a super space, but it would be creaking at the seams with eighty Festival folk, let alone the new parents. We need not have worried. Although crowded, this leant the whole evening an excited buzz.
Ably steered by Dr Piers, Sir Antony exhibited a comprehensive knowledge of all things Russian and the remarkable ability to render the very complicated accessible and easy to understand. Why did the ‘Reds’
win the Russian Civil War? What did he think would happen in Ukraine? Why was the Russian Civil War so full of atrocities and were we seeing a repetition in Ukraine? The hour, as with Abir Mukherjee, flew past, though for different reasons, this was intellectual engagement of a high order. Afterwards the queue for both presenters was long, with people anxious to get their books signed before the evening closed.
But that wasn’t the end. Last night (Monday 17th October) the first of our online events took place. 
Hosted by Lucy Kane from media partners Time & Leisure Magazine, I was ‘In Conversation’ with West Camel, a local novelist. West’s first novel was listed for the Polari Debut Prize and long listed for The Guardian’s ‘Not the Booker Prize’ Prize. We had a very enjoyable time chatting about his latest novel ‘Fall’ set in Deptford, brutalist architecture, magic realism and twins.
There’s one more online event, on 22nd November, when the conversation is with local, award-winning travel writer Shafik Meghji about his book ‘Crossed Off the Map; Travels in Bolivia’. Tickets are only a fiver and I can guarantee the quality of the discussion.
If you want to listen to last night’s broadcast click here.
The first event of 2022’s Clapham Book Festival took place yesterday on a gloriously sunny, autumn day on Clapham Common. Starting at Omnibus Theatre on the Northside a small but determined group of walkers spent two hours discovering and discussing Clapham’s literary connections, past and present. From Roger L’Estrange, the ‘Bloodhound of the Press’ to Malorie Blackman, Children’s Laureate, via novelists, biographers, historians, poets and Nobel prize-winners we had fun seeing where they lived and worked in Clapham.
Wyndham and Bannerjee series of murder mysteries set in 1920s Calcutta, which begins with ‘A Rising Man‘ and runs to the most recent, ‘The Shadows of Men‘. Our intrepid heroes navigate the slums of ‘Black Town’, the genteel villas of Alipor, Chinese opium dens, the high politics of the Lieutenant Governor’s mansion and the low machinations of the secret service. Pre-independence India’s politics, religious and secular, feature in all the books which adds to their fascination.
In the evening we have a real treat for history lovers and all those interested in today’s Russia and how it got to where it is now. The eminent and much garlanded Sir Antony Beevor discusses his latest book on Russia – ‘Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917 – 1921′ – with Cambridge historian Dr Piers Brendon. Tickets for this are selling quickly, so I anticipate a full theatre and I’m not surprised, Sir Antony is always knowledgeable and insightful and Piers Brendon is the perfect person to draw out the historical parallels. Expect a treat.
November another online event, discussing ‘Crossed Off the Map: Travels in Bolivia’ with prize-winning travel writer Shafik Meghji. I know very little about Bolivia, so this will be new and interesting for me. Both the zoom events cost only £5.
‘Gird up your loins‘ is one of those recognisable phrases, but one can’t quite remember where from. In my mind it’s close to ‘Screw your courage to the sticking place‘, although I know that’s Lady Macbeth exhorting her husband to be bold and resolute. Both mean to prepare for the task ahead. In fact it’s from the Bible, where it’s used on a number of occasions, mostly in the Old Testament. In the New Testament we find ‘Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to end for the grace that is to be brought unto you.‘ from 1, Peter, 1:13. So, it’s about getting ready, bracing oneself for the future.
year ahead. Despite the COVID prompted cancellation of several events outside of London which I was to attend, I’ll still be busy on zoom, starting with a discussion on 17th January for Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Libraries. ‘The Controlling Idea’ is a series of discussions sponsored by my publishers, Claret Press, about books which have been made into films and the first is about Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. This is where I come in, as an expert guest, talking about Whitehall and the structure surrounding the security services, it’s where Opera is set, after all.
In addition, I’ll soon be finalising Opera for the last time, for publication in September, going through the final proofs, the front and back matter and so on. There is a publicity schedule to be agreed with Claret Press too, including an online book tour and dispatching review copies, plus all the events around a book launch, including talks for libraries, book clubs and societies and, COVID permitting, an actual book tour of real bookshops. It’s exciting. Especially as Claret has a new distributor. We are already talking about flyers being handed out at Westminster and Vauxhall Cross Underground stations – an idea originally for the publication of Plague which got completely derailed by the initial outbreak of COVID. Of course, at the same time, I’ll be continuing to publicise Oracle and Plague.
committee meeting is later this month when we hope to be able to discuss the potential programme for the event. A date for your diary is 15th October, our flagship Festival day, though we’ll be planning events around it, probably including another literary walk in Clapham and some events online with our media partners Time & Leisure magazine before and after the Festival Day.
Back in February, when the whole of the UK was in full lockdown, the death rate was still high and who knew what the future was going to bring, the CBF management team met via zoom to decide what, if any, kind of Festival would be possible in 2021. The 2020 Festival, planning for which had already begun last year, had had to be shelved and no one knew if the same fate would befall any attempt at a Festival for 2021. Nonetheless, with a vaccine roll-out already underway and the promise of better things to come we decided, tentatively, to go ahead. 
for zoomed author interviews, people might have had enough of zooming during lockdown. And would people be interested in walking round Clapham Common?
these and may do so at, say, Easter 2022 as a way of maintaining the Festival’s profile across the year. Sir Michael Morpurgo was a delight for children and adults alike and Ed Stourton spoke authoritatively and amusingly about broadcasting and journalism from world war two to the present day. Feedback was uniformly positive at 100%, which is astonishing. In retrospect I think there was a real desire, not to say craving, for a return to good quality, local bookish events and the Book Festival met that need. The livestream option wasn’t called upon.
So to the last two events of the 2021 Clapham Book Festival.
up with. It was, she saw, gradually disappearing as the area became ‘gentrified’ and property was priced out of reach of the ordinary person. The older generation was leaving for the Caribbean, from whence they, or their parents, had arrived in the 1950s. Thus ‘Echoes’ was born. She tried submitting to agents and those publishers who accepted unrepresented submissions, but to no avail, so the book was put aside ( taken out and considered every so often ) while she got on with life.
Saturday’s Festival day is over. The vibe wasn’t quite as energy-filled and buzzing as usual (numbers were restricted because of COVID) but our audiences made up with enthusiasm what was lacking in terms of numbers. The children who came for Sir Michael Morpurgo were a delight and it’s probably not overdoing it to say that their attitude towards books and reading may have been changed for life by that encounter. In the evening Ed Stourton was intelligent and entertaining, taking lots of, sometimes difficult, questions about broadcasting from the audience.
Clapham writer, one Edward Winslow, who sailed on the Mayflower. My fellow guide, Irish-born award-winning writer Annemarie Neary accompanied us, at least part of the way around the Common. Her walk and mine covered some of the same ground, though she diverged to do a deep dive into the writers who lived near the Northside of the Common, while I continued with a part circumference, taking in the Southside too.
a certain Ms Rowing who acknowledges that the ‘first brick of Hogwarts’ was laid in Clapham.
The feedback we received was uniformly excellent. But we still have two events to come, both via zoom and costing only £5. The first is tonight. I am speaking with Brixton resident Rosanna Amaka about her amazing debut novel ‘The Book of Echoes’ set in East London, Nigeria, the USA and Brixton’ You can buy tickets at 
The research is done, the cards of notes are written and the hand-out prepared, now it’s all about the weather. My Literary Walk kicks off this year’s Festival at two o’clock on Saturday and, fingers crossed, it looks like it’s going to be dry and ( relatively ) sunny! My supplications to the weather gods are working so far. It’ll be so much better a festival if that is the case, encouraging people out onto the Common and to participate in things. Omnibus Theatre, our venue, has a pleasant terrace to its Bar/Cafe which overlooks the Common and that is a good place to sit in the sunshine. But the real impact will be on the walks, which would be so much more difficult in the rain.
resident ) Annemarie Neary leads the second walk starting at three thirty. Our walks aren’t the same, though we do cover some of the same ground; we both start from outside Omnibus Theatre on Clapham Common Northside. Annemarie is focusing on the north and west of the Common, whereas I am doing the full circuit, though I don’t deviate from it, whereas Annemarie does.
As I write this there are some tickets still available for all of the ‘in person’ events at this year’s Clapham Book Festival, mainly because we have been moved into the bigger of the two auditoria at Omnibus Theatre. Social distancing necessarily reduces audience numbers ( one of the reasons the ticket price is higher this year ) but we should now have a good sized audience. Experience suggests that the majority of tickets are sold within the last week, with many people choosing to attend only on the day itself. So we will be selling tickets at the front desk too.
see him. We also have two zoom events which take place on the evenings of 19th October and 2nd November (postponed from 7th October because of illness ). I’m already preparing to interview the much praised debut novelist from Brixton, Rosanna Amaka, whose The Book of Echoes was short listed for a range of prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature’s Christopher Bland Award.
Clapham Book Festival is a small festival run entirely by volunteers and with only small local sponsors. It’s been running since 2016, gradually getting a reputation and a regular following in the immediate locale and some minor recognition in the industry (we were mentioned in The Times in 2019 and had the BBC filming a short piece). 2019 was also the year in which the Festival began to be financially self-sustaining. The future looked bright, but COVID derailed all that. There was no Festival in 2020. We took the decision that the Fest would go ahead in 2021 back in February, while England, the UK and much of the world, was in lockdown. Nobody really knew what circumstances would be like in the Autumn, so we had to be flexible and offer something rather different to normal.
So, this year, in a new and exciting partnership with media partners Time & Leisure Magazine we are presenting a series of zoom interviews and discussions with authors. We have Ben Macintyre, associated editor of The Times and best selling historian and biographer, speaking with Simon Berthon, local writer and BAFTA-winning broadcaster about his latest book Agent Sonya and all things espionage. Time & Leisure hosted the first, successful, online author interview back in July, when I spoke with best-selling local novelist, Elizabeth Buchan to an online audience. We’re staying local to end the Festival on Tuesday 19th October with Brixtonian Rosanna Amaka discussing her wonderful debut novel The Book of Echoes in an interview with me.
collaboration with Clapham Books, our local independent book shop, the Fest is offering tickets to the livestream to include a copy of a book, plus postage. Tickets this year are, it has been pointed out, more expensive. Yes, they are, but we are a charity and we can’t project running an event to make a loss. Given that audience numbers are restricted ( though not as much as we originally feared ) we had to reflect that in prices. It will, I have no doubt, put some people off, but the zooms are all at £5.
still finding interesting places new to me, sometimes close to home. Ten days ago I found myself in Stockwell.
Leisure Magazine. It was somewhat daunting, to be interviewing the man who had interviewed so many famous, and infamous, people and whose voice had formed part of the backdrop to my mornings for so many years. Stourton was a main presenter on Radio 4’s Today Programme for a decade – as well as The World at One and The World This Weekend, both of which he still does on occasion.
not to be late, I was ridiculously early. So I wandered towards the address I had been given and discovered, for the first time, Stockwell Park or the Stockwell Conservation Area. It received that designation in 1973 and covers the old Stockwell Green (the 15th century manor house which formerly stood there has links with Thomas Cromwell) and the later 19th century developments of Stockwell Crescent and the roads running from it. Built primarily in the 1830s the surviving buildings are elegant early Victorian villas with gardens. They were built to different designs, which distinguishes them from the smaller, ‘pattern built’ south London Victoriana elsewhere (like some of my beloved Clapham).
found St Michael’s Church of England church (consecrated 1841) and a blue plaque marking the home of Lillian Bayliss, Director of the Old Vic and Sadlers Wells theatres and founder of the forerunners of the English National Opera, the National Theatre and the Royal Ballet. The whole enclave was a delight and so very near to the busy Stockwell Road which runs directly into the City. I never knew it existed.
around the literary sites of Clapham led by local authors, including the novelist and award-winning short story writer Annemarie Neary and crime fiction writer, Julie Anderson. Clapham has a long and illustrious literary history and this is a unique way of exploring it, but ticket numbers are limited so be sure to get yours early. Although we cannot be sure what level of restrictions will apply in October, if any, the walks will take place regardless of all but the strictest of lock-down circumstances.”
newspaper, will be discussing his most recent book Agent Sonya, a biography of Soviet agent, Ursula Kuszinsky and trading stories of legendary spies with local author and broadcaster Simon Berthon.
& Leisure Magazine. This is a new departure for the Festival. It will bring high quality author interviews, often with local authors or writers connected with Clapham and south London to a wider audience all year round. Panel discussions and conversations are planned. The first of these, with best-selling local author Elizabeth Buchan, whose new book Two Women of Rome was published in June, will be taking place on 28 July. Elizabeth will be discussing her work, the settings for her books and the importance of history in her books. This is a free event to inaugurate the programme but please register at Eventbrite 
Julie Anderson 