n quentin woolf

anthology launch

Our recently published anthology of short stories and poetry contains writing from a diverse group of writers who meet each week ar Eastside Books in Brick Lane. The book holds a vivid cast of characters, all of whom have a connection with a certain bookshop in a certain East London street. Private detectives and aid workers rub shoulders with Holocaust survivors and down-and-outs;obsessives discover true love and jackpot winners discover who their true friends are. In amongst the fiction, the true story of Brick Lane and it’s envorons is told in bite-size pieces: from the contemporary East London music scene to warring ideologies, from the issue of East End poverty to the importance of choosing the right beigal, The Bookshop In Brick Lane has writing to suit every taste.

The authors of this book meet each week at Eastside Books in Brick Lane and are:

Linda Chapple, Marybel Moore, N Quentin Woolf, Ced Chen, Stefano Peter Pini, Warren Davis, Helen Gilbert, Shuab Parvez, David Pidgeon, Dan Nicolai, Madeleine North, Marc DuBois, TJ Howard, Jill Young, Tera Brouwer, Gareth Storey, Frances Wasswemann-Bildner, Peter J Mahon, Jane Miller, Kiki Sousa Otto

Please join us for the launch party at 8pm on December 3rd for drinks and nibbles.

sleepless in whitechapel

Adrian Morris

This week’s show was a real treat to present, although a sleepless night left me sounding a bit flat. Alexes Walker and Thomas were first in to the studio. Alex T has the most complex-looking customised electronic set-up connected to his violin, consisting of a home-grown laptop program and an impressive-looking set of pedals, all of which produce the amazing sound you can hear on the recording. Alex Walker’s voice is great – all the brooding aggression of Lou

Alex Walker

Reed or Nick Cave, with the addition of that Scots snarl. I haven’t come across any acts like Ura-Ana.

Actually, we had quite a music-heavy show this week – and about as diverse a mix as could be dreamt up. It was great to welcome Kalia from London Greek Radio and her nay, and Alex Farrell and Kleibans from London Afrobeat Collective, who gave me a guided tour of a musical world I

Alex Thomas

hadn’t heard of a week ago. Their music is a defiant marriage of the chilled to the deft, and I’ve had it on my MP3 player all day today.

Fran Millican-Slater and I often run into each other at critique groups in the area, so already had an idea she’d sound good on radio but – what a voice. I swear she could make the ingredients of a packet of Monster Munch sound interesting. The situation reminds me a little of my much-missed friend, writer Dan Nicolai, currently waiting for rain in the Pacific NW, who used to attend the same critique groups and who also has a calming, almost hypnotic, reading voice; occasionally you could tell from listeners’ blissful

Francesca Millican-Slater

expressions that they’d long abandoned the narrative he was reading and were just lost in his voice…

Artist Gareth Williams and Adrian Morris of the Whitechapel society were getting on like long-lost friends before the recording; so much so that I felt bad breaking them up. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, by any means (there was a good debate going between Francesco Benenato and Jacob Sam La Rose last week, I seem to recall), and I think I may be missing a trick: perhaps I should

Gareth Williams

save myself a lot of trouble and just mic up the green-room. Individually, both men gave interesting angles on social responsibility as integral parts of what they do. Adrian was particularly keen to talk about the responsibility he feels for highlighting the plight of women at the time of the Whitechapel murders, while Gareth’s views on community art seemed to chime with those of Marsha Bradfield of HTAP, a few weeks ago.

So plenty to entertain and entrance, and even more to think about. By

Kleibans and Alex Farrell

the end of the show the sleeplessness had been blown away.

Listen to this edition of The Arts Show.