Newsletter: At the Oxford Literary Festival 2011

Friday 25 February 2011

We’re delighted to be heading to the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival for a fourth year, with three panel discussions.
On Sunday 3rd April, we’ll be marking the 75th anniversary of Rudyard Kipling’s death with an Orwell vs Kipling debate (similar to our previous Orwell vs Dickens debates at Oxford and Buxton). Paul Anderson (journalist and editor of Orwell in Tribune) and Sarah Bakewell (who won the Duff Cooper Prize for How to Live: A Life of Montaigne this week) will defend Orwell against Charles Allen (Orwell Prize-longlisted for Kipling Sahib) and one other for Kipling. You can read Orwell’s essays on Kipling (one from 1936, the other from 1942) on our website.
We have two events on Tuesday 5th April – at 10am, a discussion on ‘Comedy and the Coalition’ with cartoonist Martin Rowson (and others), and at noon, we ask ‘Does it make a difference who funds the arts?’. Sir Mark Jones, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, will be one of the panellists, chaired by BBC arts editor, Will Gompertz.
We’ll have details of more events shortly.

The Orwell Prize 2011

This year’s Prize has received a record-breaking 213 entries for the Book Prize, 87 journalists for the Journalism Prize and 205 bloggers for the Blog Prize. To see a full list of entrants, now linked for your reading pleasure, visit our website.
The longlists will be announced on 30th March 2011.

From elsewhere

On the web this week:

Events

A number of previous winners will be appearing up and down the UK over the next few weeks:
Aye Write! Glasgow
Jewish Book Week, London
Cambridge Book Festival
Qattan Foundation
Also, this year’s Political Quarterly lecture (PQ are one of our partners) will be given by David Miliband on 8 March. Visit the LSE website for more information.

The Wigan Pier diaries

This week, entries were published on 19th, 20th, 21st and 24th February.
Next week, entries will be published on 27th February and 2nd and 3rd March.
In addition to the blog, we have a Google Map tracking Orwell’s journey, a flickr set of archive images, and our page on The Road to Wigan Pier, with the first chapter and other links.

The Wartime diaries

Next week, entries will be published on 1st, 3rd and 4th March. If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter. And you can subscribe to this newsletter via email.