Festival Books
ANDREW MAWSON
Social entrepreneur takes matters in hand
When Andrew Mawson walked into Bromley-by-Bow Centre in 1984, the voluntary organisation was neglected. under-used and falling apart. much like the East London community surrounding it. Yet both were filled with enormous potential and today, the centre is a template for regeneration groups across the country. in the wrong hands. Mawson‘s success story could play like a cheesy Hollywood movie. Instead. he turned it into an inspirational book about the merits of taking matters into your own hands. rather than relying on public services.
The Social Entrepreneur: Making Communities Work shows how thinking like a business but acting with a social conscience can produce remarkable results. And. just like Mawson himself. the book is wonderfully free of political jargon and rhetoric. ‘l've spent 25 years working on a housing estate in East London so I wanted the book to be very accessible to ordinary people.‘ he says. ‘lt’s not an academic document. it's full of stories that people can relate to.‘
Making his Book Festival debut. Mawson will discuss how social entrepreneurship could help parts of Scotland escape the poverty cycle. as well as imparting some of the finer moments from Bromley-by-Bow's recent past. “I'll just tell a few of our stories and try and bring it to life for people.‘ he says. ‘And explain how we went from a small church with 52400 in the bank to the point where we're now putting a billion pound project together.‘ (Kelly Apter)
I 73Aug, 72.30pm, £9 (£7).
HELEN FITZGERALD Gruesome tales from Glasgow- based Aussie
A
Currently writing her fourth thriller. ex- parole officer and social worker turned screenwriter Helen FitzGerald was in perpetual ‘movie development hell'. until her latest rejection prompted her to transform the story into a debut novel. ‘Dead Love/y came so easily,' the
DANNY WALLACE
Ghostbusters-obsessed yes man with another voyage of self-discovery
The trailer for a Danny Wallace movie biopic might 90 something like this:
‘In a time of global terrorism, credit crunching and general fatigue with social networking sites, one committed tea drinker’s relentless optimism in the face of cynicism and pervading gloom made him a bespectacled icon for western civilisation and anybody who enjoyed good company and berking
around.’
A little hyperbolic perhaps, but then 31-year-old Wallace, born in Dundee but a trotter of the globe, combines an upbeat, everybloke affability with lively intelligence and the instincts of a shrewd media operator: an author, TV presenter, comedy producer, magazine columnist, DJ and cult leader who correctly answered every question on Mastermind on his chosen subject of Ghostbusters. ‘I could have chosen Bolshevik Russian ballet dancers or the Crimean War,’ he explains. ‘Could have and got nothing.’
In the self-discovery/drunken bet tradition, Wallace’s Join Me, in which he established a cult of kind deeds, and Yes Man, where he agreed to everything, Friends Like These is his latest caper chronicle. Married, approaching 30 and ‘living in a nice part of London’, he discovered a childhood address book full of old friends’ names and resolved to find them all before fixing the guttering. Spanning Dundee to Japan and reuniting him with a German rapper, Fijian chief and time traveller, the book should resonate with anybody who’s ever lost touch.
‘In their eyes, you can see the little boy you used to know. People have an obsession with MySpace and Facebook, all these little clues about friends’ lives, but they tend to stop at an email. I try to turn up at the door.’ Friends Like These has already been movie-optioned. ‘lt’s not a movie until it’s a movie,’ he stresses. ‘Join Me is still being developed, but I’ve realised that most films take several hundred years. I think ET was written sometime in the
1700s.’
Nevertheless, Yes Man will be in cinemas this December, starring Jim Carrey. ‘I’m no Hollywood mogul, but I can see a story about a bloke who used to work at Argos might not make an international hit, but they did their own thing and if it’s warm and funny I’ll be happy.’ (Jay Richardson)
I 73 Aug. 8.30pm, £9 (£7).
Glaswegian-based Australian recalls. 'It was like I'd been swimming upstream for years and suddenly turned around.‘ A bleakly humorous acc0unt of acmdental mother Knssie. who cheats with her best friend's husband and admits to murdering her on the West Highland Way. it's explicit from the first paragraph. ‘I don't hold back.’ she says. 'I like SQueamish, icky bits. Working in Barlinnie. I'd see seven offenders a day. Glaswegians are great storytellers but they often had awful
16 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 7—44 Aug 2008
tales and it's certainly informed my
writing.‘ One especially gruesome scene came
from her husband. American Cousins scribe Sergio Cascr “He suggested the
tent pegs in the eyeballs. And having
read the book. I don't think he's any
more scared of me than he was. I think he was always pretty scared.‘ Her second novel. The Devil’s
‘ Staircase. due Out in February. recalls FitzGerald's experience of London ' squatting, while the follow-up to Dead
Love/y will be My Last Confession (out next summer) which is already
attracting BBC interest. Set two years
on, the book is about Krissie getting too close to a prisoner. As a reformed wild child. 41 -year-old mother-of-two FitzGerald concedes that there are a lot of things about Krissie that are similar to her. ‘But I've never killed anyone.‘ she says. ‘l'm not as daft as she is.‘ (Jay Richardson)
I 73 Aug (with Claudia Schreiber), 7.30pm, £6 (£4).
JAMES MEEK
Johnny Depp-friendly author and journo
As well as writing novels. James Meek has spent a lot of time as a journalist reporting from conflict zones. and this experience fed into his latest fictional work, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. A global book, it ranges from London to rural America. but the most significant action occws in Afghanistan and Iraq as the novel's protagonist. the jaded. cynical reporter Adam Kellas. struggles to find love and a purpose. “It's based on personal experiences. but that sounds lame and simplistic.‘ says Meek. ‘lt's a novel, so I have license to make things up and they are thoroughly mixed in with actual events. so it's not possible to disentangle.‘
The book takes a swipe at war reporting as well as the publishing industry. Kellas is trying to write a trashy airport thriller to cash in. 'I couldn't write a book like Kellas does. not caring about it.‘ says Meek. ‘Trying to write a book to deliberately sell as many copies as possible: I COuldn't do that.‘
Nevertheless. Meek is a bestselling author. His last novel, The Peop/e's Act of Love. was a breakthrough success translated into 20 languages. and now there‘s a film in development produced by Johnny Depp. With all that. Meek admits to feeling the pressure to maintain his success. ‘You can‘t get away from the sense of expectation, but you just have to block it Out and do what you want to do. do it as well as you can, for better or worse.’ (Doug Johnstone)
I 73 Aug, 5pm, £9 (£7).
ALAN JOHNSTON Life-enhancing event from ex- hostage
When Alan Johnston was kidnapped at gunpoint in Gaza and held in solitary confinement for l 14 days. he used an imaginary wooden life raft and a mind- game called the River of Time to keep himself sane. As the last western journalist who had stayed to report back on the chaos of the Palestinian- lsraeli conflict. millions of people —
' including news channels like Al Jazeera