We are thrilled to announce that the tickets for our 2022 Causley Festival of Arts and Literature are now live!
Held across the 29-31 July, writers, artists and creatives will be leading a variety of events, including workshops, interviews, exhibitions, poetry picnics and castle tours, as part of this year’s ‘pay-what-you-can’ programme. Excluding our workshops, all events will be ticketed as free, but if you are able to support the work of the Trust, you can make a donation at checkout. Each ‘pay what you can’ event will have a suggested ticket price, which you can pay as a donation.
This year we have our main festival programme (running across 29-31 July), in addition to a Community Day and a Digital Festival both held on the 30th July. Whether you can join us on the ground in Launceston, or via Zoom, there’s an event for everyone, wherever you are in the UK.
Read on for our fantastic line up …
Cathy Galvin:
Cathy is a poet, editor and journalist and lives in Altarnun, north Cornwall. As a champion of the short story form she has founded the Word Factory, co-founded the Word Factory Apprentice Award and the Sunday Times Short Story Award. She has been a staff journalist for the Sunday Times and Newsweek. She has published three poetry pamphlets with Melos & Guillemot Press. Her awards include a Hawthornden Fellowship and a DYCP grant from Arts Council England. She welcomes the chance to work with writers in any genre. Cathy will be leading a writing workshop as part of ‘Inner Landscapes’ with Mary J Oliver. You can attend either or both workshops.
Vahni Anthony Capildeo:
Vahni Anthony is an acclaimed writer and the Causley Trust’s 2022 artist in residence. They are Trinidadian Scottish and moved to the UK in 1991 to read English language and literature at Christ Church college at the University of Oxford. They have published eight books and eight pamphlets so far in their career and their interests include plurilingualism, traditional masquerade, and multidisciplinary collaboration. Vahni Anthony will be leading a digital workshop, co-hosting a keynote reading event with poet Pascale Petit and will be interviewed by Causley Trust Director Nicola Nuttall on their life as a writer.
Pascale Petit:
Acclaimed British poet Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. She spent the first part of her life as a sculptor and trained at the Royal College of Art, and held numerous exhibitions, including on London Underground and in the Natural History Museum, London. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl, from Bloodaxe in 2020, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and for Wales Book of the Year. Petit has received six major awards from Arts Council England. Pascale will co-host a keynote reading with Vahni Anthony Capildeo and will be interviewed with Vahni Anthony by Causley Trust Director Nicola Nuttall, on her life as a writer.
Annamaria Murphy and Rick Williams:
Annamaria Murphy is a writer with BBC Radio 4 and formally with Kneehigh Theatre. Rick and Anna have been collaborating for many years with musicians Bagas Degol, combining stories and music. They will lead two events at the Causley Festival in Charles Causley’s final home, Cyprus Well. Join them on Saturday 30th July for a soiree in the sitting room with a Causley tilt, of songs, stories and a cranky.
Mary Oliver:
Mary J. Oliver is a writer and artist and lives in Newlyn, west Cornwall. Her debut, Jim Neat, is a memoir containing poetry, prose, found documents and photographs. It reveals the secret life of her father, a hobo in Canada during the 1930s, told from a 21st century feminist perspective. Her practice involves the integration of text and image, and her workshops focus on the use of visual triggers to stimulate writing. Mary will be leading a writing workshop as part of ‘Inner Landscapes’ with Cathy Galvin. You can attend either or both workshops.
Arthur Quiller-Couch, always known as ‘Q’, was much admired by Charles Causley. Q’s many accomplishments and gilded career have been ably documented by two biographers – two male biographers. How different would the perspective on the eminent man be were his story recounted by the women closest to him? This is the question lying behind author Julia Grigg’s novel in progress and her choice of Mabel, Q’s sister, also a writer, as her main character. At the Causley Festival, Julia will lead a presentation that shows the exploration her fictional account makes of the somewhat vexed sibling relationship between Mabel and Q, revealing they shared a dark secret as Q faced down a personal crisis, in addition to hinting at what may have spurred him on to achieve fame in the way he did. Julia will be joined on stage by actor Kim Hicks, who will speak in Mabel’s voice. Kim is a Bristol-based specialist in historical re-enactment.
David Devanny:
David Devanny is a writer, multimedia artist and academic. He currently lectures in Creative Writing at Falmouth University. His academic research uses both quantitative and qualitative data to perform a cultural analysis of poetry publication, specifically with regards to digitisation. David will lead a creative writing workshop at Launceston Library and two poetry tours at the Causley Festival.
Annie Fisher:
Annie Fisher is a semi-retired literacy consultant, and sometimes visits schools as a storyteller. She enjoys writing both light and serious verse and has been widely published in print and online poetry magazines. Her two main publications, both with Happenstance Press, are ‘Infinite In All Perfections’ (2016) and ‘The Deal’ (2020). She is a member of Taunton’s Fire River Poets. As part of a two-part event with Frances Corkey Thompson, Annie will be reading and discussing a varied selection of poems, focusing on using comedy with serious intent. Annie Fisher hopes to entertain you by incorporating four of the elements she particularly relishes in poetry: levity, brevity, soul and song.
Katrina Naomi:
Katrina Naomi is a poet based in Cornwall, who works internationally. She is the winner of the 2021 Keats-Shelley Prize and her most recent collection, Wild Persistence, (Seren, 2020), received an Authors’ Foundation award from the Society of Authors. Her poetry has appeared on Poems on the Underground and BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, and in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. Katrina has a PhD in creative writing and teaches for Arvon and the Poetry School. At the 2022 Causley Festival, Katrina will be leading a talk on how she became a poet, a digital workshop on new approaches to form and readings from her most recent collection Wild Persistence (Seren, 2020), The Way the Crocodile Taught Me (Seren, 2016) and Same But Different co-authored with Helen Mort (Hazel Press, 2021).
Frances Corkey-Thompson:
Frances Corkey Thompson is a former teacher of Modern Languages and English. Upon early retirement, she began to focus on her own writing, gaining a Masters with distinction from Exeter University. By now widely published, she has read her work in places as far apart as San Francisco and Łódź in Poland. She is a member of North Devon Stanza and runs a small (but perfect) group of keen poets in Ilfracombe, where she lives. As part of a two-part event with Annie Fisher, Frances will be reflecting on both her wanderings (real and imaginary) and her childhood in Northern Ireland, reading mainly from her third collection, Watching the Door, published by Sentinel Press.
Angela France:
Angela France’s distinctive new collection of poems, Terminarchy, eloquently considers the troubling terms of existence in an age of climate catastrophe and technological change. It asks, how do we negotiate a world where capitalism and greed threaten a fragile earth, where technology seems to promise us connection but might also fuel isolation? In reframing ecopoetics in her own instinctive, radical, lyrical form, France juxtaposes the accelerated, all-consuming speed of contemporary and future times with the ‘longtime’ and ancient, and considers whether, rather than collison-course, there might be a better way to coexist. At our festival, Angela will lead a climate workshop in Southgate Arch that aims to provide us with ways of approaching climate change and its effects, in poetry.
Alyson Hallet:
Alyson Hallett is a prize-winning poet and writer who lives in Somerset. Her publications include sole-authored and co-authored books of poetry, collections of short stories as well as drama, an audio diary and an essay commissioned for BBC radio. She has held many prestigious residencies including being a poet in residence in Charles Causley’s house, Cyprus Well. At our 2022 Festival, Alyson will join Angela France and Charles Causley Trust Director Nicola Nuttall in the Guildhall in Launceston Town Hall for an evening of readings and conversation about Charles Causley’s work. To begin, Angela and Alyson will each read a Causley poem of their own choice, followed by a reading from their personal collections. Following this they will read from ‘Covid/Corvid’ and conclude by discussing Charles Causley’s poetry and his influences on their work.
Rob Tremain:
Councillor Rob Tremain has been Launceston’s Town Crier for 45 years and was elected to the Ancient and Honourable Guild of Town Criers in 1982. Join him at our festival as he chats of Lanson’s history and reads some of Charles’s poems in the locations where they were set. Rob‘s love of Lanson will shine through in his gentle stroll around the town Charles Causley knew so well.
Explore all of our ticketed events and secure your tickets here! Be sure to follow us @causleytrust for festival updates and for more information coming soon about our Digital Festival and Community Day programmes.
