Literature & Spoken Word Community | Southbank Centre

Some posts ago, as part of the intermittent series on chairing events at literary festivals, you were promised an insight into what happens when one of the authors can’t attend their own event. Please forgive the delay, but here it now is.

Having been asked to stand in for Rachel Holmes, the Head of Literature and Spoken Word at Southbank Centre, and chair the Mama Africa event with Brian Chikwava and Petina Gappah, it became apparent the night before that there was a problem.

Petina had discovered that despite her best efforts, she was not going to receive a visa in time. It seemed that urgency and priority were losing out to bureaucracy and checks despite the fact that as well as being an author, Petina is a high profile, highly regarded, Zimbabwean lawyer who has a permanent job in one of the wealthiest nations of the world (Switzerland) and who is highly unlikely to trouble the resources of the UK taxpayer. The reasons for the delay, far from being sinister, were rather more prosaic. The UK consulate, it seems, now outsources such applications to a private company who have their own pace and procedure, one that cannot be affected by human reason or, come to that, humane reasons.

So, the double bill in the programme now sadly reduced to a single bill with chairer, (sic. See earlier post) some quick footwork was required to be able to put on a show that would at least attempt to justify the price of a ticket. The starting point was that it would be introduced by Rachel H, who would explain the situation, apologise for it (despite it being beyond her control) and offer any audience member who so wished, a refund. Very decent behaviour on the part of Southbank, I thought and somewhat at odds from the music-world equivalent where certain lead singers seem to just shout ‘you’re not getting your f***ing money back’ when the sound packs up!

So, the show went on and as any decent chair would, I took it as a challenge to try to ensure that no one took up the refund offer.

Now the key to this revised programme was Brian Chikwava, who not only is a star author, but was also a star human on the day. He’s not the biggest fan of reading aloud from his work, but when the situation was explained to him, he instantly understood that it would make for a better event if he were to read, rather than he and I talking for 45 minutes and then opening up to questions from the floor.

So we had a plan. He and I would discuss the themes of Harare North, the inspiration behind it, the origin of the extraordinary and compelling voice that he wrote it in and suchlike. He would then read an extract. We would riff for a few more minutes and then, some 40 minutes in, we would take questions from the floor. And so it was or thereabouts; a quick fix to a problem. Heavily reliant on the graciousness of the author I grant you, but the show went on, Brian was funny, generous and thoughtful, the questions came thick and fast from the audience and were brilliant in range and depth and to my knowledge, no-one asked for their money back. Or maybe Rachel just is too kind to tell me.

If you have been, thanks for reading.