Patrick McCabe and Tony White
Friday 19 September
After Thursday evening's consideration of the North, and what it means to be a northern writer, Friday's guests brought two very different regional voices into play.
Tony White's virtuoso reading from Foxy-T transported the audience to the E-Z Call Telephone and Internet in the heart of Bangladeshi East London. The story of Foxy-T and Ruji-Babes, the two young women who run the shop, and is told in a voice which could belong to the heroines themselves: Tony White described it as the hybrid accent of young Londoners, the sort you overhear behind you on the bus without knowing whether the speaker is black, white or Asian.
Patrick McCabe's choice of extracts from his Call Me the Breeze travelled still further from the North, from the debatable lands of the Irish border to somewhere suspiciously like paradise.
The ensuing discussion, chaired by the Arts Council's Mark Robinson, brought matters back down to earth, as it examined the problems of the literary scene: too much marketing, too little good criticism and too few small presses!
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Novels by Patrick McCabe and Tony White are available from the Literature Festival bookstall |  |
