To celebrate the release of By Royal Command in paperback on May 28, Absolute Radio at 105.8FM is running special 
programming all week and a very exciting competition for Young Bond fans of all ages.
Starting this Monday, 25 May, Absolute will be airing a series of pre-recorded trails and live reads from By Royal Command, as well as offering fans a chance to win a copy of the book. This will culminate Saturday (30 May) from 10am on the Jo Russell morning breakfast show where 2 phone-in listeners will battle it out to win a family holiday in Jamaica courtesy of Beaches Resorts.
Click HERE (or on the image) to listen to the BBC documentary in which Andrew Motion explores and tells the story of the proudest legacy of his time as Poet Laureate, The Poetry Archive - hundreds of poems, read by their authors and all available online, free to everyone.
Motion began the Archive in 1999 with sound producer Richard Carrington, and it is still growing in size. It includes contemporary poets reading their work, including Seamus Heaney, UA Fanthorpe and Jackie Kay and historic recordings by poets including Hilaire Belloc, Siegfried Sassoon, WB Yeats and even Tennyson and Browning. As well as the poems there are sections for children and teachers, interviews with poets, poets in residence and useful information about genres, forms and metres. If you want to know what an anapaest is, or a pantoum, the Poetry Archive can help.
Continue reading ‘LISTEN AGAIN TO THE LAUREATE’S LEGACY’
Claire Kilroy’s mesmeric new novel ALL NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED was launched at a sparkling event in Dublin this week. Set in the Dublin of the mid 1980s – gripped by a heroin epidemic and light years from the post EU economic boom of today – “All Names Have Been Changed” tells the story of a small group of mature students on a writing course at Trinity, who become dangerously obsessed with their tutor, a notorious writer. Brilliantly exploring the shifting group dynamic, as events spiral ever further out of control, this is a novel of considerable verve and ambition. Following earlier forays into the worlds of art restoration and classical music, it is further evidence of a writer with a natural gift for narrative and atmosphere.
UPDATE: Dr Mary Shine Thompson, writing in The Irish Independent, has just given it an amazing review, ‘All Names Have Been Changed is truly remarkable. It does not just satirise stage-Irish writers: Kilroy spills their bag of writers’ tricks before us, exposing cheap novelistic double crosses. She is a consummate novelist as well as a fearsome critic. Her plot is as taut and meticulous as any of Deirdre Madden’s and her literary references light and unostentatious. Read this story for its witty uncompromising honesty and its dead-on dialogue’
Niamh Greene (pictured) is one of Ireland’s biggest bestselling success stories of the last decade with a massive 350,000 copies sold of her last two books – Secret Diary Of A Demented Housewife and the follow-up Confessions Of A Demented Housewife.
This week sees the launch of a sensational new standalone novel LETTERS TO A LOVE RAT – also published by Penguin.
Continue reading ‘THE LAUNCH OF THE LOVE RAT….’
Florence Nightingale by Mark Bostridge has won the Elizabeth Longford prize for Historical Biography. Florence Nightingale is the first biography 
of Nightingale in 50 years, totally refreshing our understanding of one of Britain’s most iconic heroines.
‘It is hard to imagine how one might improve on Bostridge’s masterly understanding’ Sunday Times
’A masterly work, sympathetic but even-handed, and enormously enjoyable to read’ New Statesman
’Perceptive and engrossing … a fascinating portrait’ History Today
To launch the paperback publication of Florence Nightingale Mark Bostridge will be giving an illustrated lecture A Florence Nightingale for the Twenty- First Century on Monday 11 May at 6.30pm / Governor’s Hall at St Thomas’ Hospital.Tickets £8 (includes glass of wine) available from the Florence Nightingale Museum, Gassiot House, 2 Lambeth Palace Road, London, SE1 7EW / Tel: 02047 620 0374, the webshop www.florence-nightingale.co.uk and on the door.
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