Nottingham Festival of Words has gone to press...

As we write, our programme is being printed. It's not happened until now because some of the fantastic international events we are bringing you didn't get confirmed funding until a week ago and we've been working our socks off since then to get the final programme completed. So it is an appropriate time to give a big high five to our designer at Silbercow and printers at Russell Press who have been exceptionally friendly, patient and responsive to our increasingly hysterical demands. Sorry, I meant urgent demands.

Russell Press themselves have an interesting history, being founded by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in 1968 which seems a spectacularly relevant coincidence to some of our international programme, especially an event called Faultlines (14 October) which will be chaired by English Pen and features writers from conflict-ridden and dangerous parts of the world.

Tickets for this, and other events, will be on sale via the Nottingham Playhouse Box Office very soon.

The only exception to this are the tickets for Ali Smith in conversation with Jon McGregor on Friday 17 October at Nottingham Lakeside Arts - tickets are already on sale via the Lakeside Arts Box Office. Ali Smith's book, How to be Both, has today been announced on to the Man Booker shortlist - we are very excited to be welcoming her along.

With a month to go, it's party time!
We'd like to invite you to help us please - and be amongst the first to hear what's planned. We will be holding a programme launch on Thursday 18 September at 6pm at Nottingham Writers' Studio.

All welcome - on condition you're prepared to take away some posters and programmes to spread the word far, wide and quickly!

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Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain

Tate Liverpool: Exhibition 28 February – 11 May 2014 Adult £8.80 (without donation £8) Concession £6.60 (without donation £6) Help Tate by including the voluntary donation to enable Gift Aid Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain , is a new take on how the changes in the meaning of words reflect the cultural shifts in our society. This dynamic exhibition takes its name and focus from the seminal 1976 Raymond Williams book on the vocabulary of culture and society. An academic and critic influenced by the New Left, Williams defined ‘Keywords’ as terms that repeatedly crop up in our discussion of culture and society. His book contains more than 130 short essays on words such as ‘violence’, ‘country’, ‘criticism’, ‘media’, ‘popular’ and ‘exploitation’ providing an account of the word’s current use, its origin and the range of meanings attached to it. Williams expressed the wish some other ‘form of presentation could be devised’ for his book, and this exhibition i

'Not as dumb as he looks' - Muhammad Ali on Bertrand Russell

In his autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story , Muhammad Ali recounts how Bertrand Russell got in contact with him, and their ensuing correspondence: *** For days I was talking to people from a whole new world. People who were not even interested in sports, especially prizefighting. One in particular I will never forget: a remarkable man, seventy years older than me but with a fresh outlook which seemed fairer than that of any white man I had ever met in America. My brother Rahaman had handed me the phone, saying, ‘Operator says a Mr. Bertrand Russell is calling Mr. Muhammad Ali.’ I took it and heard the crisp accent of an Englishman: ‘Is this Muhammad Ali?’ When I said it was, he asked if I had been quoted correctly. I acknowledged that I had been, but wondered out loud, ‘Why does everyone want to know what I think about Viet Nam? I’m no politician, no leader. I’m just an athlete.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is a war more barbaric than others, and because a mystique is built up

James Kirkup

James Kirkup has died, aged 91. In 2004 he sent us a copy of No More Hiroshimas . He had originally collected together this volume of hia A-bomb poems in 1983, but it took twenty years before we published it 'as a real book'. James recounts 'My A-Bomb Biography' in his preface. Here are the opening lines of the title poem, No Mor e Hiroshimas . At the station exit, my bundle in hand, Early the winter afternoon's wet snow Falls thinly round me, out of a crudded sun. I had forgotten to remember where I was. Looking about, I see it might be anywhere - A station, a town like any other in Japan, Ramshackle, muddy, noisy, drab; a cheerfully Shallow impermanence: peeling concrete, litter, 'Atomic Lotion, for hair fall-out', a flimsy department store; Racks and towers of neon, flashy over tiled and tilted waves Of little roofs, shacks cascading lemons and persimmons, Oranges and dark-red apples, shanties awash with rainbows Of squid and octopus, shellfish, slabs o

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