MORE TAME THAN FLAME - MARCH 31 - 1.26PM - 2019
Geraldine McCaughrean - the Bodleian Divinity School - 12 noon
I guess I just felt a little underwhelmed... Not that is was author Geraldine McCaughrean’s fault - after all her CV speaks for itself, having won the CILIP Carnegie Medal twice: the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (three times), the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Smarties Bronze Award (four times) and, maybe most impressively of all, the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award. So perhaps truth is, I misinterpreted its title. “Words, words, words’ it screamed in the brochure: ‘The Case Against Dumbing Down’. And by way of introduction added: ‘Carnegie medal winning children’s author Geraldine McCaughrean argues against publishers’ demand for ‘accessible prose’ and warns it could create an underclass easy to manipulate and lacking the skills to reason their way out’. Indeed, it continued to whet my appetite for what I assumed was going to be a rallying cry for the written word by adding: ‘McCaughrean originally made her comments on accepting the 2018 Carnegie Medal for her novel ‘Where the World Ends’. She said readers “should be bombarded with words like gamma rays, steeped in words like pot plants stood in water, pelted with them like confetti, fed on them like Alphabetti spaghetti, given Hamlet’s last resort: ‘Words. Words. Words.’” But my hankering for a fire and brimstone-like confrontation between good (the joy of highlighting our constantly evolving language) and evil (astonishingly, a US publisher recently turned down one of McCaughrean’s novels for being too difficult, citing use of the word ‘gallimaufry’) never quite materialised. I left after 25 minutes so maybe voices were later raised, banners waved and torches lit, and if so more fool me. But in the end I guess I was spoiling for a fight that was never meant, on this occasion at least, to happen.
Festival media partner
Supported by the Delegation of the European Union to the UK
Supporter of the festival's Voices of Europe programme
Festival cultural partner
Festival ideas partner
The Spanish Embassy: supporters of the programme of Spanish literature and culture
The Cervantes Institute, London
Festival on-site and online bookseller
Wines of the Douro Valley
Where learning meets opportunity: education partners of the festival
Five-star hotel partners of The Oxford Collection
Five-star hotel partners of The Oxford Collection
Oxford International Centre for Publishing
Accountants to the festival
Prestige publishing partner. Celebrating 25 years in Europe in 2024
Partner of Oxford Literary Festival
Supporters of the programme of American literature and culture
New College founded 1379
Exeter College: college home of the festival. Founded 1314
Worcester College founded 1714
Lincoln College founded 1427
Trinity College founded 1555
Magdalen College founded 1458
Reuben College founded in 2019
Founded 1884
Brasenose College founded in 1512
Festival Digital Strategy & Web Design
Olive oil from Sicily
Alumni Office
Oxford University Images
Local radio partner
-
Dinomania for those aged 7 to 99 - April 3 - 3.46pm - 2022
-
Heard the one about the blood donor scheme for bats…? - April 2 - 11.44am - 2022
-
As dazzling as the HAL 9000, as entertaining as Woody Allen - April 1 - 3.37pm - 2022
-
‘Round like a circle in a spiral…’ - March 31 - 6.15pm - 2022
-
Food for thought - March 31 - 3.32pm - 2022
-
Fit for Royalty - March 30 - 3.56pm - 2022
-
‘A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind…’ - March 30 - 11.24am - 2022