Here I am indulging in my favourite part of a book festival appearance – signing my books and chatting to a reader.
Theatre by the Lake is somewhere I’ve visited for the ‘Words by the Water’ festival in Keswick regularly over the past 12 years. The ‘lake’ and ‘water’ in question is Derwent, the third biggest of Cumbria’s Lake District.
A beautiful location and the place where I had one of my most memorable conversations with a reader. My book ‘This Boy’ had won the Orwell Prize and at my event I’d been speaking about the profound influence George Orwell’s books had in my politics as a teenager.
The elderly lady I was talking to, rather as I was talking to the lady in this photograph after my appearance on Saturday, told me she’d known the great man. Upon further enquiry I discovered that the woman who’s book I was signing was Lucy Bestley, George Orwell’s niece, who told me about her memories of being with the great man on Jura, the Hebridean island where he wrote his final novel, ‘1984’.
At Friday’s event I was talking about my concise biography of Harold Wilson (‘Twentieth Century Man’) and no, this lady wasn’t related to Harold, but like all my readers, she was a pleasure to meet and chat with.
