Tuesday 11 September 2018

Burnley Literary Festival

From Mike Waite
Event on 1968 / counterculture at Burnley Literary Festival
THE third annual Burnley Literary Festival runs from 28 September to 1 October, and features a wide range of events, including street theatre about the campaign for womens’ suffrage, lectures on Sylvia Plath, interactive workshops and much more: www.burnleyliteraryfestival.co.uk

We thought that you / your readers / people you are in contact with could be particularly interested in one of the sessions:  Anarchist poets and Burnley Wood communes: ‘1968’ counterculture around Burnley & East Lancashire’.

This will run at Burnley Central Library on Saturday 29th September, starting at 11.30 a.m., and finishing a little after 12.30.

The key inputs will be from Tina Morris, a poet and children’s writer, who contributed to Michael Horovitz's landmark anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (Penguin Books, 1969), and Bruce Wilkinson, author of Hidden Culture, Forgotten History: a northern poetic underground and its countercultural history  (Penniless Press, 2017) : http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/books/hidden_culture.htm

More details: The ‘summer of love’ and radical counter-culture didn’t just happen at the Woodstock music festival or amongst student protestors in Paris. ‘1968’ and its promise of alternative lifestyles and new progressive values drew in young people in Burnley and Blackburn.  The culture and politics of East Lancashire were enlivened by theatrical ‘happenings’ on the streets, and a lively subculture of poetry readings and little magazines. This session will include discussion, reminiscence and declarations, touching on a 1960s obscenity trial in Blackburn, and the beginnings of local co-operative housing and environmental politics.

Tickets are free, but must be booked in advance:

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