We are always pleased to be a partner in the Durham Book Festival. This year saw the return of Durham alumnus Jeremy Vine.
The Durham Book Festival is always an eagerly anticipated fixture in the City’s calendar and several of our University colleagues took part in various events this year.
On 15 October, our Vice-Chancellor and Warden Professor Karen O’Brien welcomed Durham English graduate and long-established journalist Jeremy Vine back to the City, introducing his talk on WH Auden and the County Durham landscapes that inspired the poet.
Professor O’Brien commented:
"As an institution of learning, we’re very pleased to once again have supported Durham Book Festival. This year’s programme was exciting, challenging and highly varied."
Jeremy Vine at Durham Book Festival 2022, photo by Topher McGrillis
“I greatly enjoyed joining our renowned graduate Jeremy Vine for his talk on WH Auden and dropping in to other events during the Festival too.”
If you missed the event, you can still check out the self-guided walk created by Jeremy Vine and North East England Blue Badge Tourist Guide Ruth Robson. The WH Auden-themed route starts and finishes in Rookhope, and you can listen to Vine’s overview of Auden, his writing, and his fascination with the North Pennines along the way.
L-r: Dr Abbie Garrington, Jeremy Vine at Durham Book Festival 2022, c. Topher McGrillis
There were a number of other exciting commissions to go with the Festival programme, including exclusive films and essays such as the one by Durham Professor of Creative Writing Dr Naomi Booth, examining the life of Violet Hunt.
Hunt was a Durham-born writer who founded the Women’s Suffrage League in 1908 as well as being among the founding members of English PEN. You can read the essay for free via the Durham Book Festival website.
Dr Booth also interviewed two new writers, Jessica Andrews and Natasha Brown, whose novels are exciting works of contemporary fiction.
Picking up on current events, Dr Markian Prokopovych, Associate Professor of Modern European Cultural History here at Durham, recorded a roundtable discussion that was featured on YouTube on the opening day of the festival.
L-r: Dr Naomi Booth and Natasha Brown at Durham Book Festival 2022, photo by Topher McGrillis
The topic was ‘Ukraine: Geopolitics and History in the European Borderlands’, and the participants were Olesia Khromeychuk (Ukrainian Institute in London), Olena Palko (Basel University), and Stanislav Cherkasov from our twin institution in Ukraine, Zaporizhzhya National University. You can watch the recording online.
With a view to making the Festival more broadly accessible, the organisers also live-streamed events from the Gala Theatre, provided live captions, and offered the services of British Sign Language interpreters, as well as considering the physical access requirements of attendees.
Professor O’Brien added:
It’s excellent that New Writing North made such efforts to make this year’s Festival as accessible as possible. We share their hope that this has opened up the Festival, and literature, to new and larger audiences.
We’re sad that the Festival is over for another year but we’re already looking forward to the literary delights that next October’s programme may hold.
Find out more about the Durham Book Festival here.