Student-led storytelling festival organised by Middlesex University considers transformations in literature and writing By Amanda Symbor
North London Story Festival, run annually since 1996, is a student-led storytelling festival organized in the Hendon campus of Middlesex University. This year, following governmental guidelines, the festival will be taking place online between 15th-18th March 2021. The organizing committee took advantage of the current situation and invited authors not only from the UK but also from Iran and New Zealand.
This year’s theme is transformation: in the publishing field, but also the process of writing and editing as a transformation itself. The festival will start on the 15th March at 4 pm with a talk on how to present stories through different media – the web, podcasts and social sites. Guests will be members of the National Centre for Writing. On Monday there will be creative writing workshops run by James Kenworth and David Cottis, screenwriters and lecturers at Middlesex University. On Tuesday, the festival’s guests will be Lara Thompson with her debut crime novel titled One Night New York and authors of the documentary Voices Apart – David Heinemann and Elvina Nevardauskaite. On Wednesday, Ariel Kahn and Judith Bryan will discuss the importance of research while working as a writer along with the author’s quest for transformation. Judith’s novel, Bernard and the Cloth Monkey, was selected by Bernadine Evaristo as a classic of Black British fiction. The last day of the festival will belong to two amazing magical realist writers, Monique Roffey with her novel The Mermaid of Black Conch and Leone Ross author of This One Sky Day.
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Apart from the live sessions on North London Story Festival’s website, multiple written interviews will be available, commissioned specially for the festival including one with paranormal romance writer Nalini Singh, Nadine Dalton-West, short-listed for the British Fantasy Society award, Nazid Hamzavi and Sana Nassari, Iranian authors, who will be talking about translation and the writing process as bilinguals. Moreover, best-selling fantasy author A.J. Dalton will reveal his journey as a writer, and there will be an opportunity to view YouTube recordings by Middlesex University’s MA Novel-Writing students on their own writing journeys.
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