Living with a Legacy: Review of Miranda Seymour’s In Byron’s Wake at Durham Book Festival

Miranda Seymour, author of the award-winning In My Father’s House, has drawn on fascinating new material to tell the stories of County Durham-born Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace, wife and daughter respectively of the poet Lord Byron. Nicola Wigmore learned more at Durham Book Festival about two women who broke with convention, to controversial and...

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Finding Old Friends: Review of Persephone Books at Durham Book Festival

From being neglected in a dusty drawer to wearing smart new covers in a bookshop, having travelled via London, India and Germany: a Persephone Books novel goes through a remarkable journey as this publisher brings neglected works by female authors back to life. Yurie Watanabe enjoyed a celebratory tea party at Durham Book Festival. ‘Persephone Books...

‘We’re all bloody weird’: Review of Robin Ince’s I’m a Joke and So Are You at Durham Book Festival

Comic laughter and psychological suffering might seem to exist on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. However, Robin Ince’s I’m a Joke and So Are You challenges the distinction, and suggests that the sources for comedy and the triggers for therapy lie equally within all of us. Martin Gleghorn listened to Ince’s own funny but...

Revisiting the Beginning: Review of Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls at Durham Book Festival

The Trojan War is known as a man’s story: a quarrel between men over a woman, stolen from her home and spirited across the sea. But what of the other women in this story, silenced by history? What words did they speak when alone with each other, in the laundry, at the loom, when laying...

Bringing Hild Home: Review of Vibeke Vasbo and Gaye Kynoch at Durham Book Festival

As a novel originally written in modern Danish about an Anglo-Saxon English saint, The Song of Hild, by Vibeke Vasbo, posed an interesting challenge for its translator into English, Gaye Kynoch. Rachel Fennell attended their discussion at Durham Book Festival, to learn how a book inspired by English history and landscape found its way home....