Monthly Archives: December 2012

LeftLion 50

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LeftLion celebrated its 50th birthday on 1 December and to celebrate we sunk a few beers in the ridiculously expensive Orange Tree. We decided not to milk this in the magazine because it’s not really our style. We’ll save that for 2014 which will mark our tenth year of surviving on wits alone in the brutal realm of print media. Instead we celebrated our latest significant anniversary by interviewing Shane Meadows who appeared in the first ever issue. It made for a nice bit of symmetry while also giving us the excuse to break our number one rule that you only ever get one interview in the magazine.

The front cover was shot in my front room but you wouldn’t be able to tell as the background was blurred out to focus in on the main image of a Quality Street tin which would later become ‘Clumber Street – an unsavoury assortment of chattiness and trainer shops’. Dom Henry popped over to take the image and brought an array of Christmassy treats with him – wine, smelly cheese, chocolates, to be used in the shot which was wolfed down shortly after.

Photoshoot in our front room.

The Quality Street tin was painted white for the photograph so that it would be easier to draw over when it was handed over to our illustrator. Now when people pop over the house for a glass of mulled wine they look at the tin and think that I’m some kind of minimalist who likes chocolate but has a Naomi Kleinesque aversion to branding.

WriteLion saw the return of a bumper book reviews pages, with reviews of Graham Joyce, Alan Sillitoe and Zoe Fairbairns as well as NottsLit Blog stepping in to review three books from Pewter Rose. I really like the idea of featuring guest reviewers looking at specific publishers as it offers a little bit more promotion for both. Our poetry page also included three bonus reviews of Sue Dymoke, Kathryn Daszkiewicz and Alan Baker. Katie Half-Price was given a Santa’s hat courtesy of our wonderful illustrator Rebecca Hibberd and got stuck into E.L.James, Naomi Wolf and Graham Rawle. It was great fun to write as always and a scary reminder of how easy it is to get into character. My girlfriend always looks a little puzzled when she reads it.

The literature interview was with Alison Moore who was recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her debut novel The Lighthouse. The illustration came from Michelle Haywood and as always is an example of getting your work (and brief) in early to allow an illustrator time to work on their design. The Lighthouse is a wonderful book, full of subtle warnings that become clearer on a second read. It also has a wonderful rhythm to it, a little like John Banville’s The Sea. Alison is a genuinely lovely person and will go on to be a very significant writer. Salt are definitely my publisher of the year for having the bollocks and faith to submit the novel, given all of the financial risks this entails.

Beeston Poets Presents: Andy Croft.

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Beeston Poets are a joint venture between Nottinghamshire Library Services, Nottingham Poetry Society and Five Leaves Publications that brings well-known poets to Beeston Library. It follows on from the ‘Poets in Beeston’ series which started in 1983 and ran successfully for the next two decades. Of all of the roles that a library fulfils (keeping you warm, free internet access, reading LeftLion), perhaps the most important one is bringing authors and readers together, and thereby strengthening the library’s civic role through literature as determined by the Public Libraries Act of 1850. With the demand to shed 28 per cent from all budgets by 2014, drawing people into libraries has never been more important.

Over the years Beeston Poets has drawn in the likes of Wendy Cope, Carol Ann Duffy, UA Fanthorpe, Roger McGough, Ian McMillan, and Adrian Mitchell – all of whom were celebrated in the Poems for the Beekeeper anthology in 1996. This year visiting poets have included Jackie Kay and Neil Astley and will be concluded by Andy Croft on 8 December.

Andy Croft has written five novels and forty-two books for teenagers, mostly about footy. But he is perhaps best known as the brains behind the unconventional and radical poetry publisher Smokestack Books. His own collections include two novels in Pushkin sonnets, Ghost Writer and 1948, and when we say written entirely in Pushkin Sonnet we mean everything, including the foreword, contents and acknowledgements. The Pushkin Sonnet is basically a technical device used by obsessive smart arses, which in Croft’s hands reads like intellectual slapstick.

Andy will be reading primarily from 1984, recently Nicholas Lezard’s Paperback of the Week in The Guardian. It’s a comic novel straight out of an Ealing comedy set during the post-War London Olympics, and includes Russian spies, London gangsters and useless poets. We guarantee it will be the best poetry reading you’ll ever go to, though tickets will likely have sold out by the time you’ve read this.

Andy Croft, 8 December 8th. Tickets are £7 (£5 concessions) and can be obtained from Beeston Library, Foster Avenue, Beeston, Nottingham NG9 1AE.
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