Corfu Dawn; Dassia Sunrise. Corfu Literary Festival. Elizabeth Speller.

Waking up to a Corfu sunrise is always a pleasant surprise.

You soon forget the worst things about travelling.

A splendid red moon at night,

 I've started reading Elizabeth Speller's beautifully-written The Sunlight on the Garden.

I was struck by this sentence on page 11:

"My family. Always travelling. Always getting away."

She writes about Eric, her maternal grandfather, on page 54:

"He distances himself from his new life by writing short stories.

They owe quite a lot to Somerset Maugham".

On her paternal grandmother, page 77:

"My other real granny, my father's mother...was the spirit of Englishness against whom abroad could be measured. She was armoured against the continent and its seductions".

On her grandmother, and the 'stifling, unforgiving mould of Victorian social attitudes', page 226:

"The last decade of the nineteenth century, which might have appeared to be the apogee of British influence and achievement, was, as it turned out, the worst of all times to be born even with a precarious toe-hold in the upper classes".

"A Times Literary Supplement reviewer said: There are echoes of Sylvia Plath’s ability to combine beauty with irony, and suffering with comedy."  Royal Literary Fund

I have just finished reading this exceptional and compelling book.

I was interested to read that "she writes her books in two delightful locations: a restored shepherd’s hut in an old apple orchard on the edge of a Cotswold valley and in a small cottage on the Ionian island of Paxos". Elsewhere I read that she lives in Cirencester.

 See https://www.judithstarkston.com/2011/08/12/interview-with-elizabeth-speller-author-of-the-return-of-captain-john-emmett/

From the Corfu Literary Festival website:

"Elizabeth Speller read archaeology and classics at Cambridge, followed by a postgraduate degree in ancient history. She is a poet and author of four non-fiction books, including a biography of Emperor Hadrian, companion guides to Rome and Athens and a memoir, The Sunlight on the Garden. Elizabeth Speller has a Cambridge MA and MPhil. and was a visiting scholar at Lucy Cavendish College. Her three novels include The Return of Captain John Emmett and At Break of Day. They are published in eight countries. She was short-listed for the Forward Prize for Poetry and provided the libretto for Michael Berkeley's work Farewell, written in memory of Sir Paul McCartney 's wife Linda. Her journalism includes The Independent, the Financial Times, the TLS, and Vogue. She has taught at Cambridge, Bristol and Birmingham Universities and was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Warwick. Elizabeth is very experienced in teaching mature students and her classes tend to be thematic and discursive, as well as informative, often including visual material and music; she hopes by the end of her course students feel they have learned rather than simply been taught. She lives in Gloucestershire and Paxos and has just published an anthology or short stories".

Avlaki Bay, Paxos

I'm looking forward to 28th September at the Corfu Literary Festival (and to the rest of the festival, which starts on September 23rd):

It's good to be back, and to report that I didn't see any rubbish by the side of the road  between the airport and Dassia! Things are really looking up - a New Dawn?

Kathimerini today:

The Festival Founders