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Editor, publisher, author, and all round busy guy, Paul Collins describes his latest anthology as ‘a sumptuous literary feast’ in which ‘no one will go away hungry, as the collection is a literary banquet with something for everyone.’ If that doesn’t whet your appetite for the collection of Australian stories, poetry and artwork that is, […]

A couple of weeks ago I brought you a post on the Hay Festival by OUP UK’s Head of Publicity Kate Farquhar-Thomson. Today, for those of you who couldn’t make it to the Festival (like me), here are some of Kate’s photos from the few days she spent there.

The festival site from on high

Priya Gopal, author of The Indian English Novel, speaks to a festival-goer

Scientists Steve Jones and Jerry Coyne. Coyne’s book Why Evolution is True was published by OUP in the UK.

Festival-goers on site. Doesn’t it look glorious?

Simon Baron-Cohen, author of Autism and Asperger Syndrome: The Facts, signs books.

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Oxford University Press author John Welshman went to his first literary festival last week, and has kindly written a post about the experience for OUPblog. Below he talks about some of the most interesting questions the audience asked him, and reflects on the differences between academic historian and popular historians, inspired by some of the fellow writers he met there.

John Welshman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Lancaster University. His book, Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain, tells the moving real-life stories of British schoolchildren evacuated out of major cities during the Second World War.

Last Wednesday afternoon found me at the Words by the Water Literary Festival in Keswick.  It was a fascinating experience, not least because it was not only the first time that I had been to a literary festival as a speaker, but it was also the first time that I had been to one in any capacity.  My Chairman had been an evacuee, and at the start we established that there were at least half a dozen evacuees in the audience.  There was a lively question-and-answer session afterwards:

Did parents have to send their children away?  No, evacuation was voluntary, and indeed registrations remained surprisingly low in the Autumn of 1939.  In fact fewer evacuees turned up at the railway stations than had been expected, and it was partly because of this that the operation was telescoped, leading to confusion in the Reception Areas, where the numbers of the parties arriving, and their composition, was different to what had been expected.  This also meant that the proportion of the child population sent away varied between the main cities.  In terms of the families who took evacuees in, on the other hand, this was compulsory, unless householders could justify their refusal in some way.  Again, there were striking variations between the Counties, in the late 1930s, in the amount of accommodation that had been ‘privately reserved’.

How important was social class?  A difficult question to answer in that working-class children went to middle-class homes, and middle-class children went to working-class homes.  Revisionist historians have argued that rather than evacuation bringing the social classes closer together, it drove them further apart.  My own view is that evacuation did reveal the poverty of people in the cities to people living in the countryside, and that this did feed into debates about postwar reconstruction.  The bulk of the people evacuated in the ‘official’ Government scheme, in contrast to those evacuated ‘privately’, were working-class children and their mothers.

What part does Churchill play in the book?  Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister in September 1939, at the time of the first wave of the evacuation, and Churchill only became Prime Minister in May 1940.  Churchill did feature in House of Commons debates from the mid-1930s which reveal the anxiety about aerial bombing that itself was a key influence on planning for evacuation.  But the metaphor of ’Churchill’s Children’ is more a device to convey the book’s attempt to focus on the wartime period as a whole, the way I follow the ch

(Click on event name for more information)

The Art of Picture Books Exhibition~ ongoing until Mar 27, Bristol, United Kingdom

20th Annual Children’s Book Illustrator Exhibit~ ongoing until Apr 18, Hayward, CA, USA

Read Across America Day~ Mar 2, USA

Words on Wheels~ Mar 2 - 7, New Zealand

Papirolas Festival for Children and Youth~ Mar 3 - 8, Guadalaraja, Mexico

World Book Day~ Mar 5, United Kingdom and Ireland

Growing Up Asian in America Art and Essay Contest~ entry deadline Mar 5, San Francisco, CA, USA

40th Annual Conference on Children’s Literature~ Mar 6 - 7, Athens, GA, USA

Asilomar Regional Reading Conference: Fired Up for Literacy~ Mar 6 - 8, Pacific Grove, CA, USA

Shanghai International Literary Festival~ Mar 6 -22, Shanghai, China

Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC)Choices Day and Charlotte Zolotow Award Event~ Mar 7, Madison, WI, USA

Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival~ Mar 8 - 18, Hong Kong

ALA’s Teen Tech Week~ Mar 8 - 14, USA

Share a Story - Shape a Future, A Blog Tour for Literacy~ Mar 9

12th Time of the Writer International Writers Festival~ Mar 9 – 14, Durban, South Africa

Rhinelander Children’s Book Fest~ Mar 10 -11, Rhinelander, WI, USA

Annual SCBWI (SA) Publishers Show & Tell Day~ Mar 11, Cape Town, South Africa

19th Abu Dhabi International Book Fair~ Mar 12 - 22, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Children’s Books in Asia, Africa and Latin America Symposium~ Mar 13, Tokyo, Japan

13th Annual Charlotte S. Huck Children’s Literature Festival~ Mar 13 - 14, Redlands, CA, USA

Salon du Livre Paris~ Mar 13 - 18, Paris, France

41st Annual Children’s Literature Festival~ Mar 15 - 17, Warrensburg, MO, USA

Exhibition of Prize Winning Works of 16th Noma Concours (2008) “Palette of Dream Colours IV”~ Mar 15 - Jul 5, Tokyo, Japan

Somerset Celebration of Literature~ Mar 16 - 20, Mudgeeraba, Australia

World Storytelling Day~ Mar 20

Harmony Day~ Mar 21, Australia

World Poetry Day~ Mar 21

Bologna Children’s Book Fair~ Mar 23 - 26, Bologna, Italy

Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Winners Announced~ Mar 24, Vimmerby, Sweden

All-Saints College Festival of Young Adult and Children’s Literature~ Mar 25 - 27, Bull Creek, Australia

7th Bangkok International Book Fair & 37th National Book Fair~ Mar 26 - Apr 6, Bangkok, Thailand

Oxford Children’s Literature and Youth Culture Colloquium Presents an International Conference: Place and Space in Children’s Literature~ Mar 27 - 28, Oxford, United Kingdom

Children’s Literature Council Spring Workshop: I Can Read It by Myself…But Do I Want To? Inspiring Emergent Readers~ Mar 28, Glendale, CA, USA

Margaret Mahy Day~ Mar 28, New Zealand

Reading the World: A Conference Celebrating Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults~ Mar 28 - 29, San Francisco, CA, USA

Childhood in its Time Conference: The Child in British Literature~ Mar 28 - 29, Canterbury, United Kingdom

Latino Book & Family Festival~ Mar 28 - 29, Chicago, IL, USA

PW recently listed the calendar for upcoming book festivals across the country. Here are the few that specialize in children's and/or international literature:

MARCH

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE FESTIVAL

Warrensburg, Mo., March 9-11
http://library.ucmo.edu/childlit/clf
(660) 543-4306
e-mail: [email protected]

Fortieth year. Authors: C. S. Adler, Gary Blackwood, Patricia Calvert, Joan Carris, David Harrison, Patricia Hermes, Ard Hoyt, Dean Hughes, Claudia Mills, Dorinda Nicholson, Carolyn Reeder, Teri Sloat, Vivian Vande Velde, June Rae Wood. Activities: 40th anniversary luncheon with David Harrison, Sandy Asher, Patricia Calvert, C. S. Adler, and Dean Hughes.

APRIL

FAY B. KAIGLER INTERNATIONAL BOOK FESTIVAL

Hattiesburg, Miss., April 2-4
http://childrensbookfestival.org/index.htm
(601) 266-4228
e-mail: [email protected]

Forty-first year. Authors: Vicki Cobb, Gerald Hausman, Kimberly Willis Holt, Loris Lesynski, Pat Mora, James Ransome, Will Weaver. Activities: luncheon with Barbara Immroth; author discussion panels; workshops for educators and librarians.

CHILDREN'S BOOKFEST

Fort Lauderdale, Fla., April 28
www.browardlibrary.org/web/bookfest/index.htm
(954) 357-7406

Second year. Authors/performers: Diane Ferlatte, Ella Jenkins, Jaime Riascos, Antonio Sacre, Dovie Thomason. Activities: quality children's performances; free arts and crafts; special storybook character appearances; free face painting; free books to the first 600 children; costumed character Geddy the Gecko; Puppets to Go; Moonlight Tales: Storytelling Under the Stars.

Horn Book Magazine wants your funny and it wants it now. You know that little last page end-bit at the back of every issue? Well apparently HoBo is running out of yuksters. They are in desperate need of amusement. How desperate? Roger's appealing to the nation via his blog.

Alkelda, I'm looking at you. I'm looking right directly at you. Children's Books That Never Were? Too perfect an opportunity to miss, no?