Books / Bristol Palestine Film Festival
The Bristol Women’s Literature Festival
Bristol already hosts its own Poetry Festival, Festival of Literature, a spring Crimefest and the autumn sci-fi and fantasy convention BristolCon: this month, meanwhile, sees the return of a fledgling festival celebrating work by women writers. After a successful first year in 2013, the biennial Bristol Women’s Literary Festival returns this month with a diverse programme including both national and local speakers.
The Festival’s six sessions begin with the screening of Paris Was a Woman, a documentary exploring the lives of artists, writers and other extraordinary women – including Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Colette and Sylvia Beach – who made their home on Paris’s Left Bank in the 1920s.
Feminism and Journalism by writers and activists Beatrix Campbell, Caroline Criado-Perez activist Nimko Ali. Other sessions include Poetry, Prose and Palestine, in collaboration with the Bristol Palestine Film Festival – while Women Writing in Shakespeare’s Time, a talk by Professor Helen Hackett of University College London, focuses on a group of writers who have been written out of history – and discusses the process of bringing them back into the canon where they belong.
is needed now More than ever
For the Festival’s final event, writer and former Bath Lit Fest Artistic Director Sarah LeFanu will be talking to novelist and short story writer Michele Roberts, playwright and memoirist Samantha Ellis, five-times Foyles Young Poet award winner Helen Mort, novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, and first-time novelist and Spike Island writer-in-residence) Amy Mason about their work.
The Festival’s stated aim is to promote women’s writing and history while countering the male dominance of literature and cultural festival line-ups. As founder and organiser Sian Norris says, “I decided it wasn’t enough to be frustrated at the continued marginalisation of women writers in our cultural scene. I needed to do something about it.
“The success of the 2013 festival was phenomenal. It is a real and vital opportunity to talk about women’s writing and women’s roles in shaping and influencing our culture, both historically and in the present. I am so proud to be part of it and delighted that Watershed will be hosting it again this year.”
Bristol Women’s Literature Festival Saturday, March 14 and Sunday, March 15, Watershed.
For more information, visit www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/season/323/bristol-womens-literature-festival
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
