Line up for this year's Brontë Festival of Women's Writing

Keighley News announces the lineup for this year's Brontë Festival of Women's Writing in September:

Events will take place over a weekend at Haworth's Brontë Parsonage – which was home to the famous literary siblings – and other venues in the village, as well as online.

The festival will open with a launch party on the evening of Friday, September 22, and a packed programme of activities will run until the Sunday.

A spokesperson says: "The annual Festival of Women's Writing is a key date in the diary at the Brontë Parsonage Museum and this year’s is a hybrid event, taking place in person and online.

"Inspired by the museum’s The Brontës and the Wild exhibition, which examines the Brontës' connection to nature and the landscape, the festival will feature a range of talks, workshops, panel discussions and participatory events.

"There will also be free family activities running throughout the weekend. [...]

"Leading female writers, poets, artists and experts are taking part in the celebration."

Amongst those participating are Bradford-based multilingual poet, spoken word artist and author Nabeela Ahmed, and bestselling author and vegan food writer Katy Beskow, who is appearing ahead of the launch of her ninth cookbook, Easy Speedy Vegan.

Libby Jackson, a leading expert in human spaceflight, will share her stories. She is the author of A Galaxy of Her Own: Amazing Stories of Women in Space, and Space Explorers: 25 Extraordinary Stories of Space Exploration and Adventure.

The author, naturalist, illustrator and sometime presenter of BBC Springwatch, Emma Mitchell, will discuss how nature and creativity can improve mental health, as spotlighted in her bestselling book The Wild Remedy.

Others to feature during the weekend will include Katharine Norbury, author of The Fish Ladder, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Wainwright Prize. More recently she was responsible for collating Women on Nature, an anthology of work by women, relating to the natural world.

And poet, and author of Teeth in the Back of My Neck, Monika Radojevic, will be present. She is a winner of the Merky Books New Writers’ Prize, founded by Stormzy and Penguin.

BBC News reports that Bolton's Octagon Theatre is going to sell 'thousands of items' from its costume department for the first time.

Some of the women's and children's period costumes worn in the theatre's 2018 production of Jane Eyre and pieces from the 2015 production of The BFG will also be sold.

Ms Newell said the theatre had been building its costume collection for over 50 years.

"Our store is literally bursting at the seams," she said.

"We are delighted to be able to offer the items a second life by putting them on public sale." [...]

The sale takes place at the theatre on 22 July.

The Bookseller reports that,

Chatto & Windus has acquired Layne Fargo’s “searing and compulsive” novel The Favourites, which “relocates the romance and intensity of Wuthering Heights to the brutally competitive world of Olympic figure skating, as a woman comes of age torn between love and ambition". (Lauren Brown)

The (strange) blunder of the day comes from Hans India:

Some of the most enchanting, and captivating, fiction, in the realm of literature, as well as the celluloid world, has arisen from dreamland. The evergreen ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, by Shakespeare, the legendary ‘Alice in Wonderland’ of Lewis Carroll, ‘Crime, and Punishment’, the masterpiece of Dostoevsky, the epic ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy, the classic ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Charlotte Brontë, ‘1984’, the novel way ahead of its times, by George Orwell, and the raging sensation of recent times, ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ by J K Rowling, all strangely have the world of dreams as their backdrop. (Dr Mohan Kanda)