Belfast Book Festival 2016 | Page 12

The Award Winning Shem The Penman… Revisited Written & Performed by Paddy Scully The Black Box Friday 10 June – 8pm Tickets: £10 An entertainment based on the life & work of James Joyce. The setting is Switzerland and Joyce is putting the finishing touches to his latest – but an interfering world war is jeopardising its publication! In an extraordinary, often comic, stream of consciousness, Dublin, its ghosts and apparitions are evoked giving our hero a hard time in his Zurich refuge; the gossiping Anna Livia washerwomen, dirty Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Gabriel, Gerty McDowell and the mob in Barney Kiernan’s pub. All are words to him….words…words…and more words’ This award winning show has been performed widely, from the UK to Europe and the USA. “Scully expands himself into a whole pubful of people. Great skill, very funny indeed” Times Literary Supplement 12 “His evocation of the life and times of James Joyce is a truly remarkable performance” The Scotsman David Aaronovitch With Stephen Walker Crescent Arts Centre Friday 10 June – 8:30pm Tickets: £8/£6 In July 1961, Yuri Gagarin came to London. The Russian cosmonaut was everything the Aaronovitch family wished for - a popular and handsome embodiment of modern communism. But who were they, these ever hopeful, defiant and historically doomed people? Like a non-magical version of the wizards of J. K. Rowling’s world, they lived secretly with and parallel to the non-communist majority, sometimes persecuted, sometimes ignored, but carrying on their own ways and traditions. Party Animals is a memoir of early life among communists. David found himself studying the old secret service files, uncovering the unspoken shame and fears that provided the unconscious background to his own existence. David Aaronovitch is an award-winning journalist, who has worked in radio, television and newspapers in the UK since the 1980s. His first book, Paddling to Jerusalem, won the Madoc prize for travel literature in 2001 and his second, Voodoo Histories, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller. Saturday 11th June