Friday 12 November: A reading by Jackie Kay

The opening night of NAWE's Conference 2010 will feature Jackie Kay, an award-winning author who has a long relationship with NAWE and so very many aspects of writing in education generally. 

Jackie was an adopted child of Scottish/Nigerian descent brought up by white parents in Glasgow. She is one of Britain’s best-known poets, appearing frequently on radio and TV programmes on poetry and culture. 

In 2007 Bloodaxe published Darling: New & Selected Poems, which included almost all of her four previous books of poetry from Bloodaxe, The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998) and Life Mask (2005).

The Lamplighter, written for the BBC to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade, is both a radio and stage play and a multi-layered epic poem, published by Bloodaxe in 2008.

Jackie Kay's fiction (from Picador) has been massively popular: her novel Trumpet (1998) and two collections of short stories, Why Don’t You Stop Talking? (2002) and Wish I Was Here (2006). She won the Somerset Maugham Award with Other Lovers, the Guardian Fiction Prize for Trumpet, Decibel Writer of the Year for Wish I Was Here and has twice won the Signal Poetry Award for her children’s poetry. Her fourth book of poetry for children, Red Cherry, Red, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. The Adoption Papers is a set text on numerous school and university courses.

Jackie is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She lives in Manchester, with her son, and was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2006.

Jackie will be available to sign books (on sale) after the reading.

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Saturday 13 November: An Illustrated Talk by Martin Rowson

Our Saturday programme will conclude with an illustrated talk by Martin Rowson, an award-winning cartoonist whose work has appeared regularly in The Guardian, The Daily Mirror, The Independent on Sunday, The Times, The Spectator, The Morning Star, Tribune, New Humanist and many other publications.

His first novel, Snatches, was published by Jonathan Cape, as was his memoir, Stuff, which was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Other books include an anti-Dawkins, anti-Hitchens, anti-God rant, The Dog Allusion, and Fuck: The Human Odyssey, a history of the world in 67 beautiful (if foul-mouthed) images. He is a vice-president of the Zoological Society of London, the chairman of the British Cartoonists' Association, an honorary associate of The National Secular Society and was once Ken Livingstone's Cartoonist Laureate for London in return for one pint of London Pride bitter per annum (now eight years in arrears).

His books include graphic novel adaptions of TS Eliot's The Waste Land and Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy, and he is currently working on Gulliver’s Travels.

He lives in South-East London with his wife and (occasionally) their two children.

Photo: © Jeff Cottenden