Welcome to the blue room
Who are we?
We meet at 8.00 pm on the first Sunday of the month, upstairs at the Bridge Hotel, Newcastle.
Encouraging new women - and men - writers to read their work, and promoting new audiences for live poetry and prose.
The Bridge Hotel is in Castle Garth, opposite the Castle Keep, on the Newcastle side of the High Level Bridge.
The cost is £4 or £3 for concessions; pay on the door.
Coming up July 6th
Our last event of the season features the best modern writing from:
Paul Batchelor, Nell McGrath, Alison Gangell and Carolyn Kirk
with music from the brilliant: Ieuan Goch ab Einion and Jane Wade
5.30-7.30pm. A workshop with acclaimed poet Paul Batchelor
Paul will lead an informal workshop, discussing and providing feedback on the work you bring in. Don't miss out - limited places available!
Cost: £8, this will include intrance to full evening event.
Paul Batchelor was born in Northumberland. He has won an Eric Gregory Award and the Poetry Business Prize. His poems have appeared in many magazines including Poetry Review, Poetry London and the TLS, and he reviews poetry and literary fiction for The Times. His first book, The Sinking Road, has just appeared from Bloodaxe.
Nell McGrath studied for her MA in Creative Writing 2001-2003 at Northumbria University and has won several short story prizes including Marie-Claire/ Virago competition in 2003 and being short-listed for New Writing Partnership Award for fiction in 2005. She has just finished a first novel and is starting another. Nell will appear at the Blue Room after spending a month in Costa Rica, writing in an artists' colony..
Alison Gangel was born in Glasgow but has lived in the North East for over twenty years. She works as an English teacher at a catholic comprehensive school in Gateshead. She completed her MA in Creative writing at Northumbria University in 2005 and went on to have work published in ‘Moodswing’ and ‘Fire’ magazine and additional work performed at the Live Theatre as part of their Shortcuts series. In 2006 she won an apprenticeship from Adventures in Fiction after submitting extracts from her first novel Give That Girl A Spotlight. The novel is now complete and under consideration with a Literary agency in Edinburgh.
Carolyn Kirk read History and Philosophy at Bath University and now lives in Uppingham, Rutland. She is married to the artist David Kirk, with whom she has three teenage sons. She enjoys spending time at their home on the Greek island of Skopelos, where she is currently writing. In 2007 she won the Blinking Eye Short Story Competition. In choosing Carolyn's story 'Adrift' as the winner of the competition, Hilary Mantel admired 'the formal lyrical beauty of this prose, and the intricate rythm and balance of the sentences; these yield themselves as immediate pleasures from the first paragraph..This is not a story that could be told around a camp fire. It can't be boiled down into an anecdote. It subdues the reader's attention to its way of telling, delicate and nuanced, confident and measured.
leuan Goch ab Einion
Ieuan Goch ab Einion is Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Wallsend based children's musictheatre company Monster Productions. He has composed over 50 scores for the theatre, dance and film. He was a founder member of the band Red Music. The programme at the Blue Room will be including his settings of lyrics by Robert Burns and Tom Hadaway.
Jane Wade was born in a 'Category D' coal village in County Durham. From an early age she was surrounded by music, books and 'pitmatic' socialist politics. She formed Jazawaki with some like-minded friends in the early 1980s, and for the remainder of the decade toured extensively at home and abroad. She also worked with Big G, The Posh Monkeys and, in the late 1980s, with The Questionnaires.
In the late 80s/90s she worked with Live Theatre, Living Memory and Northern Stage as an actor and musical director. She had leading roles in musicals such as 'Cabaret', 'Lenya', (both with Ieuan Goch ab Einion at Live Theatre) and, more recently, 'Tom and Catherine', the music for which was written by Tina Turner's guitar player John Miles. She has a reputation for being one of the UK’s premier interpreters of the songs of Kurt Weill.
