1st Prize: ‘Sand Burial’ by Abigail Zammit
2nd Prize: ‘Facebook Profile’ by C.J. Allen
3rd Prize: ‘Views of Love’ by Rita Ray

Commended:

‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp’ by Al McClimens
‘Hide Seek Find Further North’ by Zoe Piponides
‘After the Break’ by Richard Schwartz

Adjudicator’s report:

The entry had already been sifted once so all the poems I read had solid virtues. Mostly the virtues were those of control and economy as applied to anecdotal memory, the sense of personal or public history, or the understanding of a particular occasion. Had I had just those poems it would have been hard to choose a clear winner. I suppose I was looking for something with edge, ambiguity, ambition, a kind of multiplicity, perhaps even the sense of falling off an edge. It is these things that send shock waves through a poem, that suddenly almost lose the reader in the chaos of the world. I sometimes think of the poem as a game for high stakes, the poem only just surviving by taking a leap into some place by gut instinct, a place it couldn’t have predicted at the start.

My first prize – ‘Sand Burial’ – has those qualities and was a clear winner for me. There is a memory but it is transposed into the second person singular which is generally an invitation to the imagination. The scene is of danger of burial and drowning, a fear on the borders of reality. There is the idea of losing “your whole face”; of the mouth being “a scream filled with water”. The poem could have moved into cheap self-indulgent horror here (the edginess I meant above) but while the horror remains, it quickly enters the sphere of the imagination and the universal. Even so, if it had stopped there it would have been no more than a promising poem, albeit one still stuck in a specific dimension, one specific incident. It is the second part of the poem that raises the stakes. There we shift to the act of love, or sex, which is now informed by the earlier sense of being buried and drowning. The balance here is beautifully held. The poem continues to surprise us, this time with the image of the mother and the gingerbread man. But it is the coming together of the experience of drowning and the sexual act that is so potent here. I wasn’t quite sure of the use of the “unbearable lightness of being” phrase. It took me into literary territory for a moment and it lost a fraction of the suggestion of physical presence but the poem itself remained outstanding. Best of all, it took my breath away.

The second and third prizes, as well as the highly commended poems were harder to separate. They all had something strong going for them.

‘Facebook Profile’, in second place, goes about understanding the significance of a ubiquitous type of image. It isn’t a purely intellectual enquiry: the heart too wants to understand, but it is understands primarily through intelligence and form, that form being a residual kind of terza rima. Such forms are not a fetish, or a way of showing off. They are ways of inventing the poem, of letting the coincidences of language have a nicely dangerous say in the development of a feeling-idea. The form is not particularly high profile here but it guides the poem into interesting areas, from Gerhard Richter, through Wikipedia, through ciphers and the idea of truth. The form is constantly suggesting change and change can be exciting. I wasn’t quite so sure of the need for “halfway open, halfway shut” since the two terms imply each other, and the poem is a little more talky at the end than it was at the beginning, but I was taken by its fully felt-through understanding of the subject.

The third placed poem, ‘Views of Love’, starts at a personalised life-drawing session, nicely written but apparently going down a straight route. Then in verse 5 it changes, and we are in a world between memory and fable, with “There was a man who fell in love / with a lock of hair”. This could be recalling Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’ but the tone is different. It is where the poem takes a chance and gains by gambling. The change is like the change in the two halves of ‘Sand Burial’, but not quite as physical. The end of the poem performs what is often the trickiest third part of the three-part-lyric, shifting from the story of a lock of hair to a question about something glimpsed, the perception of the ending suddenly general, clear, touching and unsentimental.

Briefly, the three commendeds (I know I wasn’t asked to pick commendeds but I am always aware of how much people put into their work and it seems mean to ignore it) are quite different from each other but of similar high standard so I am not mentioning them in any specific order.

‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp’ is a very skilful and intelligent meditation on the presentation of the human corpse, moving from Rembrandt , through Holbein and Mantegna, to a photograph of the body of Che Guevara, then it remains with Guevara and his fate to the end. So the poem moves from art and morality to revolution and finally to irony about the revolutionary brand. The rhyme is very adroitly used in stanza length clusters. Maybe the poem cuts too straight a path to what it really wants to talk about, and maybe Dr Tulp’s anatomy lesson is not directly enough connected to the Christ / revolutionary theme as presented through Holbein and Mantegna but it’s a strong bravura piece of work.

‘Hide Seek Find Further North’ is original in terms of form (triplets with an xAA, rhyme scheme) and full of lovely energy at the beginning, rolling out the names of nostalgia with real gusto. It does this for most of the poem until it gets a little tired at the end. It is after all a list poem without a strong narrative structure so the danger of tiredness is there from the beginning, but I loved the way it bombed along at the start.

‘After the Break’ uses no rhyme but is more like a song in its tone and register as well as in its fine musical ear. It is in three quatrains, a reflection about forms of prayer that moves beyond commonplace. Hope snags “its jacket on January’s unvarnished frame” and at the end a veritable shower of ‘g’ and ‘p’ sounds drives the poem into a kind of ecstasy of sound.

The following poems came close:

‘Lorsica’ by Julian Stannard
‘Ordinary, like cabbage’ by C.J. Allen
‘Slamming the Years’ by Tom Jameson
‘In Another Life’ by Nicola Timmis
‘Looks about fourteen’ by Richard Schwartz
‘After the Burning’ by Corrinna Toop
‘Between the Lines’ by Martin Bennett

George Szirtes

The competition is open to everyone except members of the Alan Sillitoe Committee and their families. Theme and form are open. The only stipulations we make are that your poem should be no more than 40 lines, previously unpublished, not submitted for publication elsewhere and not entered for, or placed in, any other competition.

Apart from that, go for it! First prize: £20o. Second: £100. Third: £50. Oh, and you get your poem published on this very website. Entry fees? £3 per poem or four for £10. How many poems can you enter? Well, as long as you’re paying £10 per multiple of four, we really don’t mind. We’re firm believers in the “in it to win in” philosophy.

All proceeds will go to the Alan Sillitoe Memorial Fund. The deadline is Tuesday 22nd January 2013.Click here for the 2nd Alan Sillitoe Memorial Poetry Competition flyer; please read the guidelines on this document before entering.

Postal entries should be sent to: The Competition Secretary, 38 Harrow Road, West Bridgford, Nottingham NG2 7DU. Cheques or postals should be made payable to ‘The Alan Sillitoe Committee’.

Or you can enter by email, sending your poems as attachments to alansillitoepage@hotmail.co.uk and paying your entry fee via the “donate” button on this website. You should make a note of the PayPal reference number and quote it in your email.

Good luck!

I’m in good company today. But do I have a right to be here?

I’m not in any way suggesting it’s presumptuous of me to button-hole you; to give you, whether you want it or not, when you can’t shut me up, when you can’t answer back, a piece of my, for what it’s worth, mind.  That’s not my nature.

I’d like to think I might be related (however distantly) to them Nottingham lambs, ‘the city’s traditional roughs’ you called them, revolting anti-authoritarian plebs who slugged it out in the Old Market Square for whichever side would fill them with sufficient gin and who burnt down the Castle when the toff who lorded it over them voted against Reform.

I might be related: mentally, I mean, not physically; aspirationally perhaps, not actually; mouthily certainly, not muscley obviously.

Yet I will admit to being somewhat over-awed.  On this… your day.

Because you mean so much to us.  You know you do.

How can I forget when I was a young lad reading one of your tales (naturally I can’t remember which one) when your first-person cyclist looks over the Trent valley spread out before him from the summit of… Carlton Hill!

You weren’t just telling a story set in our home town.  You were giving international endorsement to my own suburb!

Between covers!  Of a book!  From a library!

You must know what that did for us.  Because something similar happened to you when you were a young lad coming up against Lawrence writing about Ilkeston.

You’d been there before us, paving the way.

Not much to succour us in them days.  Not even a regional TV franchise.

The Queen of the Midlands was but a remote eastern antennal adjunctive outpost of

Associated Television.  We had to suffer the ignominy of: Midlands Parade!

No-budget adverts for: corner shops; carpet warehouses; late-night chemists in:

West Bromwich; Sutton Coldfield and Walsall.

Places remote from us as: West Germany; South Korea and…Warsaw.

No wonder we were so fixated on our local legend who put us on the map.

When, in the wonderful Errol Flynn movie, revolting anti-authoritarian peasants whisper: ‘Meet Robin at the Major Oak in Sherwood.  Pass it on!’

I considered that ordinance as the very burden of my responsibility.

Now and forever.

And later, much later, when the penny finally dropped that the series which had been my founding fiction as a child, was pseudonymously penned by blacklisted reds,

I finally got the picture.  No wonder Robin Hood was my first political role model.

Now and forever.

But into that miasma of marginal geographical neglect: There was a writer from our city; a writer who’d created a character to give a face to what you call ‘the brash self-confidence’ of Nottingham, our ‘idiosyncratic and independent’ spirit.

Alan, your work validated us.  Your success granted us existence.

It’s not like that round here now, of course.  These days if you play tin-can-lurgy in the streets of Forest Fields or Carrington chances are you’ll bruise the shins of some passing short-listed, prize-winning author.  NG is getting like LA where every waiter has a screenplay that will never get out of development.

And do I have a right to be here?

We did bump into each other on the odd occasion.  I was sometimes in the audience

when you came back to do a talk.  But I’m embarrassed to say that at first I didn’t recognise you when last we met.

You’d grown a louche grey beard.  You looked like a real bohemian.

How I always wanted you to look.

You were wearing a black trench-coat.  You looked really sinister.

How I always wanted you to look.

The next week I went out and bought a mac just like yours, I’m wearing it today.

But I stopped short at the facial hair.

That was the night in the Council House when you were given the keys to our kingdom, conferring upon you the ancient right to drive sheep across Trent Bridge.

Must have been wonderful for a prophet to be honoured on his own patch at last, eh?

So do I have a right to be here?

Whenever I open one of your books I’m faced with an intimidating bibliographical catalogue of works that I’ve haven’t read – not read yet.

But there is one volume that’s always on my bedside table and into which I continually dip, probably a work you might have thought ephemeral, occasional.

It’s a travel book.  I’d like to get round to catching up on your Russian trips one of these good old days.  But this is closer to home.

This is a book I like for the photographs taken by your son David.

(perfectly capturing the heavy skies and monochrome of those surroundings we affect and strain and pretend to love so much) as well as for your deceptive prose:

an apparently simplicity masking a complexity of thought, an ambiguity of feeling

about who you are and where you come from.

You’re talking to me directly in ‘Alan Sillitoe’s Nottinghamshire’.

What an achievement to be so topographically associated.

Like Dickens’s London

Hardy’s Wessex

Lawrence’s Erewash…

Catherine Cookson country.

Now do I have a right to be here?

We have so little in common.  You were west and we were east

Me dad were Plessey and me mother were Players.

(Remember what they used to say:

‘All the world’s an ashtray and men and women merely players.’)

Your lot were Raleigh and Sturmey Archer.

Our side moved out from Sneinton and Saint Ann’s to Bakersfield and Carlton.

Your side would’ve moved out from Radford to Bilborough and Strelley.

Your angry young man’s Arthur Seaton.  My peaceful old man’s Arthur Eaton.

A universe of characterological difference in that one missing consonant.

The west side called each other ‘yoth’ and ‘blue’ and ‘serry’

In the east it was ‘duck’ and ‘chicken and sometimes even, I regret to admit, ‘sausage’.

Well, everyone says ‘duck’.

I spent years at university explaining to lovely chums educated at the likes of Cheltenham Ladies College that this is an ungendered non-sexist term

applied indiscriminately to one and all, young and old, male and female.

And besides, I can’t help it.  It’s the defining addication of where I come from.

But that, of course, was before I learned that our favourite appellation was derived, not from the farmyard, but from the Old Norse ‘dokke’ which means, I’m sorry to say, ‘doll’.  Perhaps it is misogynist after all, my duck.

So little in common.

I’ve never known what it’s like to do a moonlight flit: ‘Always’ as you put it ‘one turn of the handcart wheels ahead of the rent man’s flat feet.’

I never lived through a world war; never saw service against insurgents in Malaya, never entered the inside of a TB ward.

But we both name characters after Notts villages.  You have a fictional town and me a fictional university of Ashfield: too resonant a monochromatic place name not to purloin.

But perhaps the greatest difference between us is that I came back to live here and,

for my terrible transgressions, whatever they might be, I stayed.  Twenty five years on Dog End Alley, within the sound of Little John’s bells.

You wrote: ‘I haven’t lived in Nottingham since I was eighteen, and only left it to find to find out what was beyond, not because I disliked it.’

How could I ever blame you for going?

I keep trying to leave for that great beyond.  I keep getting dragged back somehow.

Living in Nottingham is like living in a castle… you’re constantly in a state of siege.

The first time you get broken into the insurance people insist you install:

a burglar alarm; next internal door locks; then bars on all the downstairs windows;

after that electronic gates whose pin number you struggle to summon into consciousness when you weave your way home off the tram with one or two too many inside.  Or they won’t pay up the next time (because there’s always going to be a next time.)

Your pockets jangle with a fat bunch of keys.  You’ve become your own jailer.

We’ve had the lot in the last quarter of a century.

That Peeping Tom who stalked our daughter.  Nearly caught in the act once.

I chased him down the street waving a stick but he had a bike and eluded me.

The copper who turned up… eventually, asked:

‘What would you have done if you’d caught him?’

I didn’t have a clue.

‘I’ll give you a tip.  If it does happen again and you do catch the bastard, make sure you drag him back across your property line before you have a go… sir.’

That pretty little arsonist, always wide-eyed at the front of the crowd when the fire brigade’s siren screamed down Forest Road to douse her conflagrations in yet another abandoned garage.

Then, after reading Rupert stories to my grandson I’d be out checking for empty syringes and filled toggies (found one yesterday as it happens, for the first time in some while, somebody’s trip down memory lane, certainly not mine) before I’d feel safe to let him and his chums out to play in the yard.  Where we live might locally be known as ‘The Green’ but, believe me, it’s nowt like Nutwood.  Did Mister Bear in his plus-fours have to avoid the solicitations of whores as he walked back from delivering his young cub to nursery?

I can’t remember reading ‘Rupert and the Call Girls’.

The last break-in but one was really quite memorable.

Coming back from town in the early afternoon I saw a police car parked outside and found my wife at home, unexpectedly called away from her work as a community midwife in the Meadows.  This time the cack-handed burglar had smashed through the double-glazing, instantly setting off the insurance-demanded alarm.

One of my lovely neighbours had called it in (strong bonds are forged in adversity by those of us who persist in occupying Dog End Alley for more than a season.)

So the gonif had only had time to nick the video and DVD before legging it.

I came in to hear my dear wife shout with some urgency, amazement even in her usually unflappable Australian voice: ‘Come and look at this!’

What fresh horror could this unwelcome guest have violated upon our happy home?

The telly he’d not had time to steal was on and together we watched a replay of the second hi-jacked plane smashing into the World Trade Centre, putting our trivial loss into some kind of global  perspective.

(How could I know on that day that I would be asked to tell the story of 9/11 for the tenth anniversary of that outrage which has changed our world forever?)

Heroin, I’m told, is no longer a drug of choice.  So it’s been pretty quiet since September the 11^th 2001.  Well, apart from the killing next door last August.

But that’s another story… One I don’t want to tell.

Folk who think they know the likes of us have the nerve to say:

‘You’re a writer; it’s all material; experiences to be carved out of this bitter inner-city ground, as your grandfather once mined coal from Gedling pit.’

But these are not the kind of tales I want to tell!

Next month we go to the polls to elect, don’t laugh, a Commissioner of Police, like they have in Gotham City.

Washington Irving, who visited our county, came up with that name for New York from stories he’d heard of a Nottinghamshire village because he considered his fellow Manhattanites to be, like the Wise Men of Gotham, a parcel of fools.

Last time there was a poll the turnout was: Thirteen percent!

From which the conclusion must be drawn that the other eighty-seven percent of the populace of the Arboretum Ward don’t give a toss as to their governance.

Ward?  How strange the same word is used for a voting area and for the room we’re taken into at the City Hospital perhaps to recover, perhaps to die.

And yet…

When I was living in Gotham City… I’d be walking along 14^th Street, the wind-chill factor off the Hudson River freezing snot to my cheeks, colder than Nanook of the North’s mother-in-law, when suddenly…

In my frozen imagination I’d find myself walking across Slab Square, echoes of the string trio drifting from Yates’s, scraping an out-of-tune semblance of Kettelby’s ‘In A Persian Market.’

Back again.  Home sick.

And yet…

These days, I’ll be on those yellow sands of Mooloolaba, screwing my weak northern eyes up against the chiselling sunlight of the southern hemisphere, watching container ships out beyond the crashing surf of the Pacific, exporting mineral wealth to the new world power in China, (dug from the Australian earth today as my ancestors mined the black wealth that once lay beneath our feet) hotter than a dead dingo’s donger,

drier than a pommy’s shower curtain.

When suddenly…

My sweating imagination is drawn back to Alfreton Road.

Incapable of escape.  Lost again in Nottingham.

Was that how it was for you in Majorca, Alan?

Channeling factories and twitchell’s from the world of your childhood where you could, as you so memorably put it: ‘outdream everybody’;

Streets all lost now, together with what you also called their ‘irreplaceable spirit’.

In your words:

‘I may be harping too much on the past but in my view the greatest mistake a writer can make is to look more to the future than to the past.  A writer who poses as a prophet ends by confusing his soul, and confounding the souls of those who are tempted to listen.  Art is confirmation, not affirmation.’

I’m definitely with you on the prophets.  Spare us, please, from bare-faced messiahs who have the gall to use their stage to preach what they don’t know, what we don’t need to know.  But I’m not so convinced by your ‘confirmation’ angle.

I guess I’ve got used to gaining comfort from a lack of security; footfalls disappearing, as on those elusive paths you attempted to negotiate on your walk along the banks of the Trent in your Nottinghamshire.  I’m anxious lest it might feel even more destabilising were I to find my feet treading upon solid ground.

Again you say:

‘I feel that the more memories you have the deeper you can dive down into yourself.  The danger is that you’ll get stuck in the mud or weeds, unable to come up, strike air, and go on living to create more memories.’

And I say:

Every crossword solver knows ‘lost again’ is an anagram of ‘nostalgia’:

a word that means ‘home sickness’.

As for myself, I’m nostalgic always and already

Sick for a city always disappearing from view, before my eye can get it into focus.

Sick for a home already slipping away, before my fingers can grasp hold.

A home you left to become yourself.  A city you wrote into becoming.

I’ll finish with a story that I do want to tell, set not here, but down in your deracinated metropolis.  Last Sunday I was at the Odeon Leicester Square for a film premiere

(all right, it weren’t me being papped on the red carpet).  The after-gala do was in the sublime surrounds of the Battersea Power Station (you could probably have seen the chimneys from your West London home – with a ladder and some glarses.)

A muddle in the middle of nowhere, way after midnight, dress code black tie, vodka (which you love) flowing freely.

So I had to get a taxi back to my cheap B and B.

I took to the driver from the moment I got into his cab.  I won’t say his name because I don’t know whether he’d want me to rattle away his family skeletons – though he knew I’m a writer so let the teller beware.  I was his last fare and after he’d dropped me off in WC1 he was going back to Cheam: a comedy address known to the likes of us as the quondam residence of Anthony Aloysius St.John Hancock.

As we drove along the embankment he asked me what film I’d seen that night.

It was a new version of ‘Great Expectations’

(A book, I think, that was one of your favourites, Alan?)

He said:

‘Charles Dickens.  I love that film – the old black and white one.  David Lean. What’s your favourite scene?  There’s one that means so much to me.  The young lad…’

‘Pip…’

‘Yeah.  He’s come into money, hasn’t he?  Living the idle life in London.  Then he gets a visit from the poor chap who’d brought him up in the country…’

‘Joe Gargery, the blacksmith…’

‘Yeah, yeah.  And he’s ashamed and embarrassed to see this man who loves him so much and who cared for him so well but Pip’s become a snob treats him really badly… later he realises what he’s done and he feels terrible.’

‘It’s one of the best moments in the book.’

‘I’ve never read the book.  Perhaps I should.  That scene means so much to me.’

I wanted to know why.  By now we’d reached my temporary gaff in Bloomsbury.  The driver turned off the meter and the two of us carried on jabbering together for the next three-quarters of an hour, exchanging secrets only strangers who know they’re never going to see each other again can confide to one another.

He told me:

‘My old man was an alcoholic and me mother threw him out.  One day I was coming out of school and I saw him… across the street… waiting for me in a long muddy coat, worn-out shoes, leaning on the railings, can in hand, swaying… swaying.  You know what I did?  I put me head down and walked off the other way.  Never forgot it.  Never forgiven myself…’

A long pause.  Then he said: ‘But it all comes around, don’t it?’

‘What do you mean, my friend?’

‘I’m in this cab all hours, seven days a week so my son could get a place at the grammar school.  He’s a clever lad and had to pass the exam but we still have to pay.  His friends have dads who are doctors, lawyers, stock-brokers… That’s how it is in Surrey.  I asked him why he never brought any of them home.  You know what he said?  ‘I can’t bring them here.  Why don’t you get a bigger house?’  Why don’t I get a bigger house!’

This bastard country.  Will some things never change?

We still have work to do.  We must not get lost again.

If I don’t have a right to be here for you on Alan Sillitoe day then I don’t know where I ought to be.  Dosvedanya, duck.

Yours Sincerely, M. Eaton.

(This is the full text of the tribute given by Michael Eaton on Sillitoe Day 2012, 27th October, at the Nottingham Contemporary. It is reproduced here with his kind permission.)

Sillitoe Day 2012, Nottingham’s second all-day event celebrating the life and work of Alan Sillitoe, is tomorrow.

Tickets are still available and – better still – available on the door.

Just turn up from 11am – 5pm at the Nottingham Contemporary and join us for …

• The launch of the Sillitoe Trail mobile phone app
• The launch of Alan’s seminal novel ‘The Open Door’, republished by Five Leaves
• William Ivory in conversation with Neil Fulwood on British Social Realism
• Nottingham writers Derrick Buttress, Michael Eaton, Al Needham, Ann Featherstone, Pete Davis and James Walker
• Sam Derby-Cooper’s short film ‘Mimic’, based on Alan’s acclaimed short story
• A preview of Frank Abbott’s remix of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’

Then stay with us throughout the evening for Sillitoe Night, same venue, 8pm – midnight …

• Spoken word with Notts attitude from MulletProofPoet, Sarah Shrugs and beatboxer Motormouf
• Live music from the Sleaford Mods and local legends Gaffa

Tickets for Sillitoe Day – including a free limited edition Sillitoe Trail book – are £15 from the Nottingham Contemporary: go here to book. Sillitoe Night is free, but we’d appreciate donations to the Memorial Fund.

We’ll see you there.

Sillitoe Trail – for more details, go here

Sillitoe Season 2012 – full programme

Sillitoe Day 2012 – downloadable PDF flyer

Nottingham Contemporary website

Impossible, surely?

Actually, it’s very possible. And Pilot Theatre are about to show the good folk of Nottingham exactly how it’s done. Following the play’s well-received debut at Pilot Theatre’s home town of York, and having toured Birmingham, Durham and Ipswich in the last few weeks, ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ opens at Nottingham Playhouse tomorrow for a five-day engagement.

Roy Williams’s adaptation, directed by Marcus Romer, updates Alan’s classic novella from the late 1950s to last year’s riots and re-imagines anti-hero Colin Smith as a mixed race youth rather than the angry young white lad of the original. But apart from that, the structure and most of the dialogue remain true to the original.

Ditto the attitude.

Adrian Bhagat’s interviews Roy Williams on the LeftLion website.

Book tickets at the Nottingham Playhouse website.

Pilot Theatre’s website, with more information on the play. 

The date:

The venue: Nottingham Contemporary.

The event: Sillitoe Day 2012, Nottingham’s second all-day event celebrating the life and work of Alan Sillitoe.

Join us from 11am – 5pm for …

• The launch of the Sillitoe Trail mobile phone app
• The launch of Alan’s seminal novel ‘The Open Door’, republished by Five Leaves
• William Ivory in conversation with Neil Fulwood on British Social Realism
• Nottingham writers Derrick Buttress, Michael Eaton, Al Needham, Ann Featherstone, Pete Davis and James Walker
• Sam Derby-Cooper’s short film ‘Mimic’, based on Alan’s acclaimed short story
• A preview of Frank Abbott’s remix of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’

Then stay with us throughout the evening for Sillitoe Night, same venue, 8pm – midnight …

• Spoken word with Notts attitude from MulletProofPoet, Sarah Shrugs and beatboxer Motormouf
• Live music from the Sleaford Mods and local legends Gaffa

Tickets for Sillitoe Day – including a free limited edition Sillitoe Trail book – are £15 from the Nottingham Contemporary: go here to book. Sillitoe Night is free, but we’d appreciate donations to the Memorial Fund.

We’ll see you there.

Sillitoe Trail – for more details, go here

Sillitoe Season 2012 – full programme

Sillitoe Day 2012 – downloadable PDF flyer

Nottingham Contemporary website

To celebrate this important location (rather than adultery or violence) the Alan Sillitoe Committee has commissioned local historian and author Ann Featherstone to give a talk about the history of the fair. Ann will be sharing her love of the Victorian period when the fair included freak shows and menageries, performing seals and diving shows, fat ladies and skeleton men. The Balloon Headed Baby, Mary Anne Bevan the World’s Ugliest Woman and Leonine the Lion Faced Lady are just some of the acts managed by Tom ‘The Silver King’ Norman, the man who commissioned the silver bells that are still used today as part of the Lord Mayor’s ‘ringing in’ ceremony. Sadly these oddities are long gone from the fair but if you switch on C4 at 9pm any night in the week then you’ll find they’ve found a new home.

Ann’s talk will draw upon the diaries of Sydney Race, an obscure diarist who, writing in the 1890s, documented the last live shows of the Fair before it transformed into the gleaming chav magnet that we know and love today. One regular feature of the Fair then was the animal shows (and we don’t mean the GB Lions they failed to flog at the Olympics that you’ll be able to win on hook a duck). We’re talking proper animals: hyenas, wolves, and bears, all abused and mistreated for the pleasure of the paying public. The exhibition of animals was seen as both entertaining and educational. Perhaps the most bizarre act to feature an animal was the Globe of Death (or Wall of Death) where it was quite common for a lion to be taken on the wall in a side car while bears and monkeys would also get a go.  

The Victorian Goose Fair was a bizarre, horrific and tragic experience, which explains why people loved it so much. Ann will be recounting some of these tales and illustrating her talk with visuals. She will be open to questions as well as encouraging the audience to share their own memories. If you are interested in local history, human oddities and want to escape the Fair for five minutes, then cross the road from the Forest Recreation Ground and join us in the New Art Exchange building across the road. They do some pretty nice nosh in there as well, should you crave more than cocks on sticks and mushy peas.

The Goose Fair is the fifth location on the Sillitoe Trail Mobile Phone App, which will be launched on 27th October at Sillitoe Day. For more info, please see Sillitoetrail.com or http://thespace.com/items/s00001nq

Saturday, 6th October, 4.30 – 5.30pm, ‘Victorian Goose Fair’ – Ann Featherstone. New Art Exchange, 39-41 Gregory Boulevard, Nottingham NG7 6BE. Nae.org. FREE

Now comes the biggest day in the calendar.

The date: Saturday 27 October 2012.

The venue: Nottingham Contemporary.

The event: Sillitoe Day 2012, Nottingham’s second all-day event celebrating the life and work of Alan Sillitoe.

Join us from 11am – 5pm for …

• The launch of the Sillitoe Trail mobile phone app
• The launch of Alan’s seminal novel ‘The Open Door’, republished by Five Leaves
• William Ivory in conversation with Neil Fulwood on British Social Realism
• Nottingham writers Derrick Buttress, Michael Eaton, Al Needham, Ann Featherstone, Pete Davis and James Walker
• Sam Derby-Cooper’s short film ‘Mimic’, based on Alan’s acclaimed short story
• A preview of Frank Abbott’s remix of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’

Then stay with us throughout the evening for Sillitoe Night, same venue, 8pm – midnight …

• Spoken word with Notts attitude from MulletProofPoet, Sarah Shrugs and beatboxer Motormouf
• Live music from the Sleaford Mods and local legends Gaffa

Tickets for Sillitoe Day – including a free limited edition Sillitoe Trail book – are £15 from the Nottingham Contemporary: go here to book. Sillitoe Night is free, but we’d appreciate donations to the Memorial Fund.

We’ll see you there.

Sillitoe Trail – for more details, go here

Sillitoe Season 2012 – full programme

Sillitoe Day 2012 – downloadable PDF flyer

Nottingham Contemporary website

Sunday 16^th September 2012, Broadway Cinema Nottingham:

‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ + ‘Mimic’, introduced by William Ivory

Join us for a screening of Tony Richardson’s classic adaptation of Alan’s anti-establishment novella, starring Tom Courtenay (in a career-making performance), Michael Redgrave, James Bolam and John Thaw. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of film’s release, and with the Olympics having captured the country’s imagination for over the last month or so, what better time to consider an alternative evaluation of competitive sport?

The programme also features the national big-screen premiere of Sam Derby-Cooper’s short film ‘Mimic’, based on one of Alan’s most psychologically complex short stories (from the collection ‘Men, Women and Children’). Alan mentored the filmmakers during production and personally sanctioned the film’s distribution.

With comparatively few adaptations out there (of the fifty plus books Alan published, the adaptation ratio works out at four feature films, one short film and one TV drama), this is a great opportunity to see some excellent work on the silver screen. The event is introduced by local legend William Ivory, writer of ‘Common as Muck’, ‘Night Flight’ and ‘Made in Dagenham’.

This is a one-off screening at 1pm. Visit the Broadway’s website here for more information and online booking.

Saturday 27^th October 2012, Nottingham Contemporary:

Alan Sillitoe Day 2012

Nottingham’s first Alan Sillitoe Day was held at the Council House in 2010 and attracted an amazing response. The city’s second Alan Sillitoe Day is being hosted by the Nottingham Contemporary. Clear the entire day, because the line-up is awesome.

We’re incredibly excited to be launching the Sillitoe Trail mobile phone app commissioned by the BBC and the Arts Council as part of this year’s ground-breaking online arts project, The Space (go here for a panoply of Sillitoe-related material on The Space website). Additionally, Nottingham based publishers Five Leaves will be launching their re-press of Alan’s critically acclaimed novel ‘The Open Door’.

There will also be talks, videos and artwork exploring the themes and landscape’s of Alan Sillitoe’s Nottingham, with contributions from Billy Ivory, Michael Eaton, Al Needham, Ann Featherstone, Derrick Buttress, David Sillitoe, James Walker, Paul Fillingham, Pete Davis, Neil Fulwood and others.

This is a day-long event, from 11am – 5pm; the price is £15 (including a limited edition book) and tickets can be booked online (go here) or from the Nottingham Contemporary Shop. And why not stay with us for …

Sillitoe Night!

Nottingham Contemporary’s Cafe/Bar will be hosting an evening of spoken word with attitude from Andrew ‘MulletProofPoet’ Graves, John Marriott, Sarah Shrugs, beatboxer Motormouf, as well as music from Sleaford Mods and local legends Gaffa. 8pm till midnight, entry free but a suggested donation of £3 to the Alan Sillitoe Memorial Fund will be encouraged on the door (although anyone joining us from the daytime events won’t be muscled for the three quid, honest!)

His work has appeared in magazines and journals from Poetry Review to Modern Painters. His four collections are ‘The Art of being Late for Work’, ‘A Strange Arrangement’, ‘Violets’ and ‘At the Oblivion Tea-Rooms’.

Clive was invited to read at this year’s Ledbury Festival, and we’re delighted to say that he has generously donated the fee for his appearance there (£200) to the Alan Sillitoe Memorial Fund.  Many thanks again, Clive – your name will definitely be appearing on our Wall of Honour!