Faber Academy friends and one of the most famous bookshops anywhere, Shakespeare & Company hosts the international literary festival, FestivalandCo. Podcasts of this year’s events are now online.

The line-up of authors taking part is impressive, but look out especially for Faber’s David Hare, Petina Gappah, Hanif Kureishi, Breyten Breytenbach and Erica Wagner.

The festival takes place every two years.

In Their Own Words: British Novelists is a fantastic new online offering from the BBC Archives – interviews with remarkable modern writers.

Obviously we’re biased – we’d recommend you go straight to the interviews with William Golding, Kazuo Ishiguro and Hanif Kureishi. There’s also a chance to watch Robert Graves in conversation (in 1965) with Malcolm Muggeridge. Graves was an extraordinary, prolific writer – best-known as a war poet and then for his ‘I, Claudius’ books. Faber only published one of his books – The White Goddess – but it remains in print over 60 years later.

Elsewhere, there’s Virginia Woolf from 1937, Aldous Huxley from 1958, Iris Murdoch from 1965, Daphne du Maurier from 1971, V. S. Naipaul from 1994, Zadie Smith from 2009 …

Click here to visit the BBC’s Archives.

5×15 is a new series of talks that pull together 5 speakers from different disciplines, each given 15 minutes to tell their story. The speakers include writers, artists, entrepreneurs, scientists and many more, making for a diverse and inspiring evening each time.

For more information, visit 5×15stories.com

Faber author and Faber Academy tutor Louise Doughty recounts the story of her Romany roots at 5×15 on Sep 27 at the Union Chapel in London.

We think this is great and we’re sure you will too!

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‘It’s a place to hang out and daydream, where the daily guest speakers are well-versed in radical thought and untapped local knowledge. Imagine a versatile space filled with field recordings and site-specific sound installations, that packs itself up at the end of the day and drives off into the sunset.’

This July, the Bank of America Merrill Lynch CREATE Art Award-winning project Roam starts its journey from Waltham Forest to Greenwich. Taking place in a specially reconstructed multi-purpose vehicle, Roam can be a gig venue, a lecture theatre, a nature disco, a reading room or a meeting point, depending where it stops. Sometimes it’ll be all of them in one day.

All Roads Lead to Roam: Roam London

Sam Taylor – critically-acclaimed author of The Republic of Trees, The Amnesiac and The Island at the End of the World – has started offering summer writing holidays at his home in southwest France.

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At The French Workshop, accommodation is available in three beautiful B&Bs in the same village, and the courses can be 3-day, 5-day or 7-day stays with variations including Writing and Wine-Tasting, Writing and Cycling, Writing and Jazz, Writing and Golf, Writing and Toulouse, and – for those of you who are really keen – Writing Only.

Sam has written three novels for Faber, translated into eight languages, and his first novel, The Republic of Trees, has just been made into a film (All Good Children) premiered at this year’s Cannes Festival. He proposes to guide aspiring authors through every aspect of the novel-writing process – from the first glimmer of an idea to how to deal with agents, publishers and film companies. For more details, go to www.french-workshop.com

Private Life

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley’s new novel Private Life traverses the intimate landscape of one woman’s life from the 1880s to World War II.

Its themes were inspired by the life of her great-uncle, the astronomer Thomas See, who was discredited for his controversial theories.

Read the full interview at metro.co.uk.

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Jane Smiley is the critically-acclaimed author of novels including A Thousand Acres,  Horse Heaven and Ten Days in the Hills. Her children’s novel Nobody’s Horse is published in June.

As the editor of Hang the DJ, and a man, I’m obviously a fan of lists, but this is one of the better features that they regularly run on the Guardian’s book pages, and worth a slot in Saturday’s Review if you ask me. Anyway, it’s a long while since I’ve thought about Carter USM or Jim Bob – in fact the thought of it now brings back pretty bad school memories of baggy longsleeved t-shirts and unwashed hair – but he shows pretty immaculate taste here in his list of Top Ten Illustrated Books for Adults, including a nicely worked in top spot, two mentions for Hartlepool’s answer to Cormac McCarthy (!), and my favourite book by Douglas Coupland. And it might be a couple of years off yet, but roll on that Top Ten Books by Willy Vlautin list…

Jim Bob’s Top 10 Illustrated Books for Adults at guardian.co.uk.

Angus Cargill is editor of Hang the DJ: A Book of Alternative Music Lists.

MIchael Gregorio

Michael Gregorio are Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio. She teaches philosophy. He is interested in the history of photography in the nineteenth century. They have been married for almost 30 years and live in Spoleto, a small town in central Italy. They’re the authors of the Hanno Stiffeniis mysteries – Critique of Criminal Reason, Days of Atonement, and most recently A Visible Darkness. The following article can also be found on their website, www.michaelgregorio.it.

Amber

Michael Gregorio writes:

We were interviewed last year by an American journalist named Lenny Picker of Publishers Weekly (you can read the interview here). Lenny contacted us again recently because he is writing a general article about historical crime fiction, and he asked if we would contribute some ideas.

One of his questions set us thinking: How do you perform your research?

Anyone who has read our latest Hanno Stiffeniis mystery, A Visible Darkness, may be interested to know where the principal ideas for the book came from. We also hope that this short piece with illustrations may encourage anyone who has not yet read A Visible Darkness to go out and buy a copy without delay!

The plot of the novel can be summed up thus: Procurator Hanno Stiffeniis is sent to the Baltic coast of Prussia to catch a murderer of women who work on the shore gathering amber … Lenny Picker’s question might have been: how did you go about documenting what the Baltic coast was like in the early nineteenth century?

We knew that the Baltic coast was, and still is, one of the few places in the world where amber can be found, so we began by learning as much as we could about Baltic amber, and how it is formed. Our interest grew as we learnt more.

picture one

Amber is the result of resin dripping from tropical plants, and slowly solidifying. What have tropical rain forests got to do with the Baltic Sea? We discovered that the Baltic Sea was a tropical rain forest 40 million years ago in the Eocene epoch. As the resin dripped and hardened into transparent amber, it often smothered plants and small insects, which were ‘enclosed’ inside the nuggets of amber (remember the saying: ‘a fly in amber’?), preserving evidence of their existence long after the species had died out. A naturalist named Nathanaele Sendelius published his Historia Succinorum Corpora Aliena Involventium… in 1742.

picture two

What did this mean for Prussians in the nineteenth century?

In the first place, people who believed in the Garden of Eden wondered whether it had once existed on the shores of the Baltic Sea. It also meant that the European scientific community began to take a great interest in amber ‘enclosures’ containing creatures and plants which were extinct. Long before Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, many scientists had noticed that the tiny creatures contained in amber were similar to, but slightly different from, creatures which existed in the contemporary world.

The French scholar, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, was prominent among them. His influential Philosophie Zoologique (1809) proposed a primitive theory of the evolution of non-vertebrates, which was widely debated. During the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia was overrun by the French in 1806, and vast quantities of valuable amber were sent back to Paris. Prussian nationalists and naturalists were very upset. You can see where this is leading, we hope. The amber riches of Prussia were being plundered to finance Napoleon’s military adventures. We had a plot!

We also had a setting, but how was amber actually collected on the shores of the Baltic Sea? Internet research revealed the existence of a rare book entitled Succini Prussici by Philip Jacob Hartmann which had been published in 1676. As an added bonus, a copy was available on-line from a library in Madrid.

picture three

Thus, we were able to document the clothes that amber-gatherer’s wore, and verify the techniques that they used to loosen amber from the sea-bed with prongs and spades, and skim it from the surface of the water with nets; amber floats because it contains air bubbles.

The French, of course, were going through their own industrial revolution. Wouldn’t they have tried to mechanise the process of amber gathering and eliminate the Prussian workers? We checked out a complete (?) and original copy of Diderot’s Encyclopaedie in a library in Italy. There was nothing specifically concerning amber mining, but there was information about mining in general. Nothing suited our purposes, however.

Then, by chance a few weeks later, we found an eighteenth-century print from a French edition of the Encyclopaedie at an antiques market which seemed to fit the bill.

The steel engraving shows a system of mechanical open-cast mining. We added steam, put the machine on a barge, invented the inventor, then started drilling for amber in the Baltic Sea …

We were moving away from documented historical fact and into the realm of historical possibility, but why not? It is historical fiction, after all.

If you would like to know how the story works out – and discover what we discovered about anatomical waxworks, the brave women who collected amber on the Baltic shore, and much, much more – A Visible Darkness is now available in paperback.

NB: Anyone interested in learning more should look at Amber by David A. Grimaldi (American Museum of Natural History, 1996).

Welcome to this week’s further reading / listening / watching round-up. Enjoy!

• On the Guardian website, John Caird’s Top 10 Survival Tips for any aspiring theatre directors

– John Caird will be taking part in a National Theatre Platform with actor Simon Russell Beale on Friday 9th April at 6pm

• Frances Stonor Saunders’ account of Violet Gibson – aka The Woman Who Shot Mussolini – as heard recently on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week

• Rachel Polonsky’s skatulochka – that’s Russian for ‘jewellery box’ according to the Daily Telegraph – Molotov’s Magic Lantern on Radio 4’s Open Book

• In April we publish Emily Woof’s debut novel, The Whole Wide Beauty. Ahead of publication she wrote this feature for the Guardian’s Family section

• Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, whose new book Courtiers is published in May, is named as one of the 50 Women to Watch in the Arts

• Alex Preston, author of This Bleeding City, interviewed by Mariella Frostrup on Open Book

• Hanif Kureishi’s Collected Stories appeared in March. Here’s Hanif reflecting on middle age on Radio 4’s Today Programme

• ‘You’ll struggle to find a more readable exegesis of Homer’s epic’ wrote the Sunday Times about Caroline Alexander’s The War that Killed Achilles. Here’s Caroline discussing the book, again on Start the Week

And finally …

• Spotted last Sunday evening (March 21st) on the BBC’s fine series, Seven Ages of Britain, was a 5-minute long segment [20 mins in] devoted to Mass Observation, the social research organisation from the 1930s onwards which set out to record the daily lives of ordinary people. David Dimbleby clutched in his hand and read from a copy of The Pub and the People, one of 12 M.O. books now available in Faber Finds. [Here they all are].

Henry Volans, Faber’s Head of Digital, is currently involved in a project assessing the viability of setting up an online branch of the Faber Academy, our creative writing school. We want to extend the Academy – more courses, even more variety, and across boundaries – but would that go against what makes the Faber Academy unique?

Face-to-face … or keyboard-to-keyboard?

Henry Volans writes:

It’s all about face-to-face exchanges. So how could the Faber Academy – our thriving creative writing school – work online? What could match the energy of an established writer and fifteen students practising their craft together over a long weekend or a six-month programme?

In truth we’re pretty sure that the courses at Faber’s offices and other venues in Europe will always remain the heart of the Academy. But it’s not the only way: not everyone is able to reach our venues or to work during fixed hours, for example. And there are different ways of learning online. It can take in everything from flexible, independent study to highly interactive group activity.

We’ve been researching the question for the last few months and have developed a prototype. But just as importantly we’d love to hear from people who’d be interested in an online writing course from Faber. Take a look at our questionnaire here – there’s also a chance to be part of a pilot course that we’ll run later this year.

We’d like to hear from you!

www.faberacademy.co.uk

A new, regular slot in which we pick out some of the supporting material around books, to be found in our Faber Finds Archive. Faber Finds is our POD list, which sees a return to print for some great titles. We’ve already put over 600 books back into print, and the number is increasingly steadily.

Fiona MacCarthy

Here former Guardian design correspondent and acclaimed biographer Fiona MacCarthy discusses the ambitious social experiment which formed the basis of her debut book, The Simple Life. She explains the drive to set up an experimental artistic community – an exodus of skilled craftsmen and designers from London’s East End to the idyllic Cotswolds, led by C. R. Ashbee – and analyses its success and legacy.

Why I Wrote ‘The Simple Life’

I remember my own first sight of Chipping Campden back in the 1960s. The long curve of the high street; the mellowed grey stone houses; the church with its tall tower of surprising scale and splendour, reminding one that this had once been an important centre of the wool trade; the fantastically gabled and pillared market hall standing strangely isolated like a bizarre island in the middle of the street. This is still the most beautiful small town in the Cotswolds. Even now, on an early summer evening when the tourists have receded, it retains its ancient magic and you see it much as C. R. Ashbee and his guild of craftsmen would have seen it when they first arrived in Chipping Campden from the East End of London in that hopeful early summer of 1902.

The story of Ashbee’s exodus from London in search of an idyllic way of working in the countryside became the subject of my first book, The Simple Life. I was at that time the Guardian’s design correspondent, already fascinated with creative life and motivation, why exactly works of art and craft turn out the way they do, and I found the romantic impulses behind Ashbee’s flight to the Cotswolds with his skilled craftsmen, their wives and children – in all 150 people – not only intellectually interesting but also very moving. The attempt to create an Edwardian Utopia in a small town in the Cotswolds, putting William Morris’s ideals into actual practice, was brave to the point of recklessness.

The Simple Life

The idea of handmaking was central to the project. I found this sympathetic and familiar. My own husband had trained as a silversmith. The members of Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft arrived with their tools of specialist trades; jewellery, silvers, enamelling, ironwork, furniture making, fine printing. They set up their workshops in a by then redundant silk mill. At the forefront of Ashbee’s thinking was the concept of social regeneration, of achieving a more balanced, democratic and more natural way of combining work and leisure than was possible in the squalid cramped conditions of London’s East End. There was an attractive element of mysticism. Things made in a beautiful rural setting would be more likely to turn out beautiful themselves.

One of the things I loved about the subject was the element of comedy. The simple collision of the country folk and cockneys who colonized the village. The social manoeuvrings within the workshops with their mixture of artisans and middle class idealists imbued with Ruskinian principles about destructive divisions in society caused by separating the ‘workers’ from the ‘thinkers’. In Ashbee’s Utopia workers and thinkers merged, playing in the village band, acting in the annual Guild plays, taking part in the Guild sing-songs, bathing naked in the bathing lake.

Ashbee was himself homosexual, though married, a disciple of the pioneering gay liberationist Edward Carpenter. One of the most intriguing elements of the story of the Guild in Chipping Campden is the quiet but insistent homoeroticism. This is something I would have made more of had I been writing The Simple Life today.

For me as a biographer many of the themes I first discovered in C. R. Ashbee’s story lingered in my mind. It was a fortunately rich beginning that led me on to books on Eric Gill and William Morris and the biography I am just completing, a life of Edward Burne-Jones. I still find the idea of experimental artistic communities entrancing. Next I plan to write a book on Gropius, the Bauhaus and the hopes of building a modernist new world.

More generally, since the Ashbee book was published, the instincts behind the exodus to Chipping Campden a century ago have recently been reawakened. We are now experiencing a rather similar search for an authentic way of life as people question the costs of the unbridled and unprincipled global expansion of recent years. Some of us have been returning to an ‘elemental’ mode, seeing the value of taking things more slowly, appreciating our own local countryside, retrieving our almost forgotten human skills of craftsmanship. We are even (like Ashbee’s craftsmen) tending our allotments. To a surprising extent the human longing for a simpler life lives on.

– Fiona MacCarthy

You can buy a copy of The Simple Life from the Faber Finds website.

Intelligence Squared is one of our favourite sites on the web – a brilliantly curated site aggregating great video and audio covering debate, events and controversies in the worlds of the media, culture, politics, technology and more. Watch this space for a few Faber-related events …

Click here to have a look.

The increasingly volatile argument over ebook royalties threatens to do great damage and needs to be calmed down. The truth is that no one knows yet what a fair royalty is for ebook sales. It is undoubtedly true that the fairness of a 25 per cent ebook royalty is largely untested. This is because sales are small (less than 1 per cent of the UK market) and the model still developing: the costs, price points and degree of physical book substitution are all largely unknown. Viewed in isolation, as the royalty for an edition with lower costs (e.g. no print and inventory), I can understand why writers are concerned that publishers are not offering a fair return, especially for backlist titles. Viewed, however, in the context of the large investments publishers make in advances, creating a publishable text and promoting to create a readership, the same royalty might look more reasonable. This uncertainty about what is fair is already reflected in contracts for ebook rights which allow renegotiation once the market has settled. The presentation of this complex debate to consumers by the media, though, suggests that publishers have dug in at an unreasonable rate, authors are outraged, and digital-only publishers and ebook retailers are riding to the rescue with dramatically higher shares of income for authors. Publishers, though, are not blameless in this.

Publishers must engage in an open process of establishing a fair royalty, one that evaluates the real costs and profits across physical and ebook publishing – i.e. for the work. They also need to convince writers, agents and the media that digital publishing is not a discrete activity. If we allow digital formats to uncouple from traditional print formats we will undermine physical publishing, which for the foreseeable future will be by far the more significant earner for writers and publishers. It is in writers’, publishers’ and, I would argue, readers’ interests that this be prevented.

The truth is that publishing inhabits a finely balanced ecosystem. To hive off digital rights from physical publishers is shortsighted about the long-term interests of authors and book culture. It is equally unwise for publishers to insist on a percentage royalty without making it clear that they seek to share fairly the wealth created with authors. Meanwhile, we should really all concentrate on creating a thriving market for ebooks alongside physical books, expanding the total market, and ensuring that physical and digital thinking is joined up. To do that we need to acknowledge that nothing can yet be set in stone and ensure that this is understood by the media and consumers. It’s a project to undertake openly and with attention to the complex issues. The alternative is to squabble over percentages in a weakened and fragmented market.

This week’s further reading online:

• Tonight I’m a rock ‘n’ roll scribe – part two in Richard Milward’s literary hijinks for the Guardian

• Listen again to Jonathan Lethem at the LRB – his event in January at the Bloomsbury shop, in conversation with Tom McCarthy

• Peter Carey has been busy in the UK this week – here’s his interview on Times Online, and him in conversation with Matthew Sweet on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves [listen again]

• A new name in the world of crime – Sam Eastland – interviewed on Crimesquad. Eye of the Red Tsar is the first case for Inspector Pekkala

• Edna O’Brien hints at what to expect in her memoir, which we will be publishing next year

• Kat Banyard, author of the forthcoming The Equality Illusion, on a Nightwaves Feminism special

• Legendary theatre director Peter Brook is back in Britain for a new play, ‘Eleven and Twelve’

Here’s another great interview courtesy of Granta online (we’ve already featured their interview with Paul Auster). This time Granta editor John Freeman is in New York to ask Peter Carey about the origins and inspiration for his new book, Parrot and Olivier in America, which we publish in February. An extract from the book featured in Granta 108: Chicago, published towards the end of last year.

Check back soon for a very special Faber Podcast with Peter Carey.

Interview with Peter Carey from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

About Kat Banyard

Kat Banyard

Born in 1982, Kat Banyard is at the forefront of a new UK feminist movement, having founded a widely acclaimed series of national feminist conferences – FEM Conferences – in 2004. In 2007 she featured in an Observer Woman profile of ‘The New Feminists’.

Kat was, until recently, Campaigns Officer at the Fawcett Society, the UK’s leading campaign for equality between women and men, and is a regular media spokesperson for the organization.

The Equality Illusion: The Truth about Men and Women Today

The Equality Illusion

In The Equality Illusion, campaigner Kat Banyard has written an alarm call, arguing passionately that feminism is one of the most urgent and relevant social justice campaigns today.

Structuring the book around a normal day, Banyard sets out the major issues for twenty-first-century feminism and explores how they are woven into our everyday lives. She also challenges how we think about choice and empowerment – ideas that have been so successfully co-opted by both the beauty industry and the sex industry – and argues against the notion that biology is at the heart of most gender inequality.

Banyard draws on her own campaigning experience as well as academic research and dozens of her own interviews and case studies. The book also includes information on how to get involved in grassroots action and a list of resources.

We publish the book in March but you can stay informed about related events, conversations and features at www.katbanyard.org or at the Equality Illusion Facebook page.