Hello everyone, and welcome back to another blogpost from me! With the world of books and creative writing being closely related to the theme of fantasy worlds, I decided that it would be a great idea for me to share with you my fairly action-packed experience of the DiscoveReads book festival.
What is the DiscoveReads book festival?
DiscoveReads is an annual book festival that is run by Suffolk Libraries on the bank holiday weekend in May every year. The 2025 festival hosted talks with six famous authors on a wide range of themes, from fictional novels to real-life political issues, as well as creative writing workshops. In addition to the main event being hosted in the Hold, displays featuring each of the books in the main event also appeared in six different libraries around Suffolk, for those who are unable to make it to Ipswich for the main event.
Tickets to attend events at the festival went up for sale on the 17th of April, with early bird sales running up until the 1st of May at a cost of £3 per attendee, and increasing to £5 up until the day of the festival itself, however as a volunteer in Suffolk Archives, I was given the opportunity to attend the events for free.
So without further ado, let's get to my experiences at the festival, starting with Amanda Hodgkinson's workshop that I attended on the 24th of May.
Amanda Hodgkinson - If these walls could talk: how to write historical fiction
Phew... it has been a long time since I have been to a creative writing event of any description, and my desire to go to one of Amanda's workshops has been calling me ever since the day I first met her on the Entrepreneurs' Fair in December 2023. The last time I went to a creative writing workshop was in the Bury St Edmunds library in September 2023, where I had the chance to write a piece about my 16 year old self, a piece that received positive reactions from the other attendees. Since then, I was roped in by the fact that I was about to start volunteering in the Hold, and I haven't been able to go back to Bury to specifically attend those workshops.
Now before I get to the gist of the workshop, I would like to start off by explaining who exactly is Amanda. So, Amanda Hodgkinson is a creative writing academic at the University of Suffolk, supervising PhD students and teaching modules on historical fiction as part of the masters programme on creative and critical writing. She is also an internationally renowned novelist, having written 22 Britannia Road in 2011, as well as Spilt Milk in 2014. 'Nuff said, let's get to the day's events.
I arrived into the Hold at around 1:30pm, where I sat down, had the chance to take in the classical music and the large collection of anthologies that Dial Lane was selling at their stall, and even managed to have a pre-workshop showdown with Amanda. As the time kept ticking closer to that 2:00pm start, I then strolled casually up the ramp to the breakout space, where I met Amanda's gatekeeper, guarding the entrance to the seminar room where the workshop was held. She checked the booking details to make sure that I was on the list of attendees before I was allowed to go in and get settled down with Amanda herself.
Before the fun could even start, we all had to introduce ourselves (there were eight people in the seminar room), and after spending some time describing our personal interpretations of historical fiction, it was on to the first challenge of the workshop - describe the journey to one room inside of a house and pick up an object that your character will hold on to. For this exercise, I decided to go with something a bit inspired by Amanda's experience of moving into a stone cottage in France many decades ago - a house with barely any electricity, barren, and a ladder equipped with access to a time machine that transforms everything in the house, and a clock that would always stay with the character after the transformation.
Meanwhile, the writing that I had observed from some of the other participants were just as impressive. One of the participants had described a Victorian house with mahogany panels, and a stray door leading to a room that was secreting a Montblanc pen, and the wildest of them all was Virginia Creeper's story of picking up a cod loin to feed the seagulls with (disclaimer: don't try this at home!).
Exercise over, and it was time for Amanda to switch to lecturing mode for a little bit, and I must say that she started off her talk with something very powerful when it comes to creative writing - anything is possible in the fictional space, and that not knowing what to write initially can sometimes be very creative indeed. Then the references to Hilary Mantel's novels started to come alive with descriptions of cognitive and ideological representations, as well as social cohesion - at one point using one of her quotes "unfreeze antique, unlock emotion stored and packed tight", as well as references to Spilt Milk in relation to an extraordinary mystery involving a child living with four generations of family.
Amanda's talk about emotions led on to the second writing exercise, where we had to link our reactions to the outside of a particular house to a particular feeling without expressing that feeling directly. That exercise to me was an absolute doddle, as one thing that I enjoy doing while walking around Ipswich is taking in the impressive architecture of some of the houses, particularly in the well-off neighbourhoods around Christchurch Park.
It wasn't long before the writing exercise came to an end, and we all had to share our stories with the other participants. In the mix was a straightforward story of pride in getting to a place where they could afford to live, Amanda describing Proost's 12-volume novel that is host to some of the best nostalgia on the planet, an older man who owns a house with some of the most impressive craftsmanship on the planet, and a distinctive blur between sun and denial in a house that is dilapidated in multiple pieces.
With that, the first half of the workshop came to an end, and after a short break where I spoke with Amanda about her roots in the south west and the importance of the UK motorway network in transporting goods, it was time to get on to a short reading exercise - starting with the reaction to a passage from Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan, where I must say that there were some powerful words about the features of the house - such as "ornate balustrade", "stairwell smelling of lemons", and the presence of wood described in many different layered forms. Other parts of the passage described intertwining a typical interaction with a mother into typical life, thrown in with some Scottish accents for good measure.
Then we began to discuss the second passage out of In the Heart of the Country by JM Coetzee, a story that revolved around South African livelihood. There wasn't as much to say about that passage compared to Fagan's excerpt, but the biggest takeaway is that the author exhibited a very strong voice in the sense that time lied right in the character's heart.
After a short period of Amanda switching back to lecturing mode, interspersed with a stunning quote from Toni Morrison that mentioned "12k was spiteful", and a psychedelic poem about a wedding, it was time to get to the final writing challenge of the workshop - a ten minute writing exercise, talking about a journey around different rooms of the house to find an object that is different to the one we expressed in the first writing challenge. At one point, I happened to write about a pen in a locket in the living room - that sentence made absolutely zero sense whatsoever, so I decided to change that sentence to something more fitting - a mystery box. And then the sound of ghosts came alive...
As in previous exercises, the stories of others were just as exciting to hear - of course there were loads of Montblanc pens and flying saucers being dragged around the seminar room, but some of the descriptions of the houses themselves were harrowing - one had described a creaking house with a thief that had snuck inside looking for a non-existent cheque, another talked about a home with a rickety staircase leading to some of the weirdest smells imaginable, and to close off the exercise, seagulls in bedrooms.
After being given Amanda's list of inspirational quotes from various novels (the passage from Jane Gardham particularly standing out amongst the list), the action started to wind down, and it was time to pack up and head home, with a huge sense of excitement in terms of what I had managed to achieve in the workshop.
Amelia Gentleman: The Windrush Betrayal (25th of May)
Leaving Amanda's workshop behind, I felt that her words of "you cannot be a writer without being a reader" had a very strong resonation with me, and so I needed to explore more about what it's really like to read books from other authors. So I decided to go to an authors' event that focused on the outermost peripheries of the world of fantasy maps - history, migration and culture, and Amelia's book about the Windrush scandal had the right mix of just about everything.
So, Amelia Gentleman is a journalist at the Guardian who primarily writes articles about politics and immigration. She is particularly notable for exposing the Windrush scandal in 2018, where migrants from the Caribbean who came to the UK during the Windrush era were being wrongly threatened with deportation due to a purported lack of permission to be in the UK.
Now onto the day's events. Before I was able to go to Amelia's event, I had the chance to briefly speak with Jyoti Patel, the speaker who delivered the preceding talk about her novel The Things That We Lost - a novel that revolved around how people go to great lengths to protect the people that they very much love, as well as describing vivid stories of sadness and loss. But it wasn't long before Jyoti began to leave the Hold and conversations with her turned to silence for a little while. No music. No collection of anthology books on display.
Eventually, the doors to Amelia's event flung open, and we were given one of these raffle tickets for a chance to win Amelia's book, as seen here:
Once everybody had the chance to settle down in the education room, Amelia's story started with your typical run-of-the mill political journalism story - she was in Wolverhampton covering the run-up to the general election in 2015, and her original plan was to do an interview with then-Conservative MP Paul Uppal, but in the midst of all the action, she was approached by a charity supporting asylum seekers and migrants in the area, where they asked her to conduct an interview with service users around their experiences. Amelia had then planned to come back to Wolverhampton to interview Paul at a different time.
Then, in October 2017, came the moment the Windrush scandal started tearing away at the seams, as Amelia went on to explain the story of how she received an email in her inbox that someone who lived in the UK for 49 years started receiving letters from the Home Office and was facing deportation from the country. It turned out to be the case of Paulette Wilson, a law-abiding citizen who paid taxes and even served as a chef in the kitchens of Parliament. It is unfathomable to see someone of such character suddenly have their rugs pulled from under their feet and get thrown into a detention centre for a week, nearly being put on a plane for deportation at one point.
As Amelia's talk kept progressing, it felt even more harrowing to hear stories from others from the Windrush generation who spoke up about their experiences of receiving Home Office letters - losing jobs, homes, as well as the uncertainty of when the Immigration Enforcement van would come to their house to scoop them up. And the most disturbing of them all - a cancer patient being asked to pay £54,000 for chemotherapy at an NHS hospital.
But away from all the depravities, Amelia has also given us the opportunity to understand some of the historical issues leading up to the scandal unfolding, such as the complexities of the UK's visa policy around 1948 that revolved around travel between the UK and its colonies, as well as the period leading up to the introduction of the hostile environment policy in 2012 - for a Windrush historian, the minute details around the Windrush legacy might not be the most accurate account of the situation, but for a lay person, Amelia's explanations are simple enough to understand and follow through.
Eventually, the main part of the talk ended on Amelia's background at the Guardian, where her organisation went on to cover stories about other injustices that were happening in government since Windrush, such as the Post Office scandal, as well as the award-winning coverage of the scandal that revolved around the prosecutions of Carer's Allowance claimants for benefit fraud.
Some of the questions that were asked by the audience to me evoked a sense of strong emotion and anger around what had been happening - particularly around the question of the legacy left behind by the scandal - institutionalised racism, past policies to reduce habitation by persons of non-white colour, and a lack of knowledge about Windrush by employees of the Home Office.
I even asked a question about how events in America are shaping immigration policies here, particularly in relation to news stories of foreigners in America being detained with no due process for baseless claims of gang affiliations and speaking out about Palestine - to which Amelia responded that the immigration system here isn't that much more fairer than our counterparts across the pond.
After the raffles were all drawn (the winner of the draw was number 55), the author's session came to an end, and Amelia would retire out to The Street to take on some book signings, as well as some more conversations around present-day immigration topics, before deciding to leave the Hold just before the next speaker, Elizabeth Fremantle, came at 3:00pm to deliver her talk on Disobedient.
Conclusions
Man, what do I have to say about this year's book festival? I have to admit that Suffolk Libraries have managed to get together a really good mix of authors and lecturers into this year's book festival. Amanda Hodgkinson's workshop is one of the most engaging creative writing workshops that I have been to, outweighing my experiences with the Bury creative writing workshop by a fair margin. The writing exercises flowed through really well in terms of the increasing level of challenge, as well as some really decent examples of passages from some of the world's most talented novelists that absolutely made my heart melt in some places.
As far as my ambitions to become a writer, the workshop has also completely blown everything out of the water in terms of my potential, with Amanda and the other workshop participants describing some of my writings from the exercises as some of the better examples of writing that they have seen, and has given me a stronger sense of hope that I can become a self-employed writer in the future.
Moving on to Amelia's talk, there is absolutely no doubt that her story is one of the most powerful stories about politics that I have heard, and I found it absolutely incredible that a mundane request from a migrant charity for an interview on routine service user experiences during the 2015 general election had set the stage for exposing some of the biggest injustices that previous UK governments had created around immigration and other areas of politics.
With that, I hope you have enjoyed my coverage of the events that I went to as part of the DiscoveReads Book Festival. Amy's bootcamps are starting up again from the 29th of May, and so for my next set of blog posts, I am hoping to provide you with some coverage of my experiences there!
Signing off now,
Jakub
Comments
Post a Comment