Luke Wright

14th September 2007
Guest: Luke Wright, one of the UK's most successful stand-up poets. In 2006 he took his debut solo show Luke Wright,Poet Laureate to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. And this year Luke took his solo-show Luke Wright- Poet and Man. Luke Wright also one of the founding members of the poetry collective Aisle 16: Power Point- 2005 Critics Choice in Time out; Poetry Boyband – 2006 Time Out Critics' Choice of the year. In 2007 they toured with Aisle 16’s Services to Poetry.

Competition Question: What is the name of our current Poet Laureate?
Correct Answer: Andrew Motion
Prize: Aisle 16's collection of poetry 'Live from the Hellfire Club' and a CD 'The Rise and fall of Luke right'
Winner: Zoe Hamilton

Books:

The Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh
This trilogy of novels about World War II, largely based on his own experiences as an army officer, is the crowning achievement of Evelyn Waugh’s career. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war too much for him. Yet, though often somber,the Sword of Honour trilogy is also a brilliant comedy, peopled by the fantastic figures so familiar from Waugh’s early satires. The deepest pleasures these novels afford come from observing a great satiric writer employ his giftswith extraordinary subtlety, delicacy, and human feeling, for purposes that are ultimately anything but satiric.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
In 1971, as Mao's Cultural Revolution swept over China, shutting down universities and banishing "reactionary intellectuals" to the countryside, two teenage boys are sent to live on the remote and unforgiving mountain known as Phoenix in the Sky. Even though the knowledge the narrator and his best friend Luo had acquired in middle school was "precisely nil," they are nevertheless considered dangerous intellectuals and forced to spend their days carrying buckets of excrement up and down the mountain to fertilize the fields. But when they bargain their way into obtaining a forbidden Balzac novel from their friend Four Eyes, a new and dizzyingly vast world opens up to them. Through Balzac, the narrator discovers "awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden" [p. 57]. And when Luo falls in love with the beautiful Little Seamstress, life and literature come together in a passionate romance. Luo and the narrator plot to steal Four Eyes' suitcase full of books both for their own pleasure and to transform the seamstress from a simple peasant into a sophisticated woman. Their success in doing so, and the unexpected consequences that follow, push the novel to its conclusion.

Taming the Beast by Emily Maguire

At the tender age of fourteen, Sarah Clark is seduced by her thirty-eight-year-old English teacher, Daniel Carr, and becomes entangled in an illegal, erotic, passionate, and dangerous affair—a vicious meeting of minds and bodies that ends badly. Devastated by grief and longing, Sarah embarks upon a series of meaningless self-abasing sexual encounters, hoping to reclaim the intensity of that first relationship. Then, seven years later, Carr unexpectedly returns and Sarah is drawn again into a destructive coupling. Now that she is no longer an innocent young girl, is she strong enough to finally tame the beast within her?

Digging to America by Anne Tyler

Friday, August 15th, 1997. The night the girls arrived. Two tiny Korean babies are delivered to Baltimore to two families who have no more in common than this. First there are the Donaldsons, decent Brad and homespun, tenacious Bitsy ( who believes fervently hat life can always be improved), two full sets of grandparents and a host of big-boned, confident relatives, taking delivery with characteristic razzmatazz.Then there are the Yazdans, pretty, nervous Ziba (her family 'only one generation removed from the bazaar') and carefully assimilated Sami, with his elegant, elusive, Iranian-born widowed mother Maryam, the grandmother-to-be, receiving their little bundle with wondering discretion.

Every year, on the anniversary of 'Arrival Day' their two extended families celebrate together with more and more elaborately competitive parties, as tiny, delicate Susan, wholesome, stocky Jin-ho and, later, her new little sisterXiu-Mei, take roots, become American …

While Maryam, the optimistic pessimist, confident that if things go wrong – as well they may – she will manage as she has before, contrarily preserves her 'outsider' status, as if to prove that, despite her passport, she is only a guest in this bewildering country.