Special Guests: General Fiction
Walk Across The Sun, Corban Addison
The lives of seventeen-year-old Anaya Ghazi and her younger sister Sita are torn apart when a tsunami hits their costal home in India, leaving them orphaned and homeless. As the girls struggle to make their way to the safety of their convent school in Chennai, many miles away, they fall victims to a trafficking ring and end up imprisoned in a brothel in Mumbai. Their only hope of salvation lies with Thomas Clarke, a disillusioned Washington-based lawyer who has travelled to India in pursuit of his estranged wife and has accepted a position with an NGO dedicated to rescuing trafficked girls. The ensuing tale spans three continents and shines a light into the dark recesses of this most terrible of trades – the selling of innocence and the corruption of children for profit.
A Walk Across the Sun is US lawyer, Corban Addison’s first novel and is a real page turner, beautifully written, compelling but with a hugely important message at its heart. I met with Corban during his short visit to Ireland earlier this month and asked him about his motivation for writing the book, his hopes for what it can achieve and how his passion for writing about issues of social justice is likely to keep him busy long into the future.
You are clearly keen to raise consciousness and prompt activism about trafficking. Why did you decide to go the rout of fiction rather than non-fiction? Did you believe you could reach a wider audience?
Ian Martin and The Coalition Chronicles
A brief word of warning before you start, Ian Martin is a swearing consultant. Don't read this interview if you are offended by strong language!
Ian Martin, The Thick of It's renowned Swearing Consultant turned Faber author, was interviewed by Donal Conaty, author of the political satire of the IMF bailout The Eighty-five Billion Euro Man. Here they talk bad language and great books...
When BBC 4's The Thick of It brought political satire kicking and screaming into the 21st century it also introduced the splendid notion that someone could have a job as a Swearing Consultant.
That couldn't be hard, could it? As an Irishman I like to think I can swear with the best of them. I can't. Very few if any of us, however, if any of us, could do it as well as Ian Martin. His peculiar talent for comic swearing as demonstrated on his satirical website Martian.FM got his foot in the door at The Thick of It as a Swearing Consultant on series one. He soon established himself as a writer on later series of the award-winning comedy that savagely ripped apart a political landscape culture where only the spin had substance has come to characterise the show.
With The Coalition Chronicles (Faber & Faber, September 2011) Ian Martin has taken his sweary brilliance to parliament with a satirical account of the first year of Britain's Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition government.
We all see our politicians giving the same dull, evasive, answers to the same dull questions on a daily basis. But what would they say if we weren't listening. If the microphones were switched off and the cameras weren't present.
Grace Dent on Twitter and Being Queen of the Universe
Grace Dent is quite remarkable. A girl from a working class background who didn’t have the benefits of a polished, connected upbringing, and who is eternally grateful to Scotland and Stirling University for providing her with an education, she has conquered every area of the media. From newspapers (The Guardian) to magazines (Marie Claire), radio, and some of the most popular shows on TV including The Culture Show, Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, and The Apprentice: You’re Hired, she has also written eleven bestselling novels which have been translated into twelve languages – and her Diary of A Snob novels were acquired for TV development by Nickelodeon in March 2011.
Originally from Carlisle, now living in London, Dent is bright, sassy and has a warm no-nonsense approach to life that is funny, refreshing and has won her thousands of fans, most recently on the social network Twitter. Her new book, and first non-fiction How to Leave Twitter (My Time as Queen of the Universe ) charts her journey from her first tweet, ‘looking puzzled at twitter’ to having over 89,000 followers (at the last count, and no doubt more by the time you read this!)
When we met during her flying visit to Dublin, I asked her how it all started. She revealed “I always wanted to get out of Carlisle. I loved reading, read loads of books and magazines. But I had a terror of getting a real job after Uni. I looked at Paula Yates and Julie Birchill and always knew there had to be a job out there for someone who had a funny turn of phrase; the problem was I knew I was never going to pick up the Guardian and find an advert for someone who was funny with bad spelling.”
Read more: Grace Dent on Twitter and Being Queen of the Universe
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