Salisbury Literary Festival: The Write Stuff with... Richard Skinner

Today is the final feature for Salisbury Literary Festival ahead of the first event which starts on Wednesday.  I'm really looking forward to the mix of events I'm going to, I currently have tickets to 6 events and I'm still at this late stage thinking of buying 1 more!

It's my pleasure today to hand the blog over to Richard Skinner to introduce the event he is chairing, Food and Fiction at Fisherton Mill, which is a on the road version of the Vanguard Reading sessions that he set up.

I started Vanguard Readings because, at Faber Academy, I continually meet a lot of brilliant new writers who, as long as they remain unpublished, receive very few invitations to read their work. So, in 2011, I decided to do something about that and set up a monthly series of readings as a platform for new writers to read their work. The idea immediately struck a chord, our audience quickly grew and, seven years later,  Vanguard is now a thriving community of writers who meet once a month to share their experiences and support Vanguard and its ethos of promoting new work.

The set-up at Vanguard is simple: 6 readers per event reading alphabetically for around 10 minutes each. It doesn’t matter if you’re an unpublished writer or Ian McEwan, it’s done alphabetically and democratically. Over time, the 10 events held every year have shaped themselves into different kinds of event. For instance, I put aside four events per year for my Faber Academy alumni to read. I make sure to programme two poetry-only events per year, which tend to be very special nights. Also, a few years ago, I started to offer half the slots per event to small presses so that they could showcase their authors. So far, among others, we have hosted Galley Beggar Press and Boiler House Press from Norwich, the Smith Doorstop Laureate’s Choices series from Sheffield and Smokestack Books from Middlesbrough.