Colin Wilson — The Angry Years
And then there was Colin Wilson: a fine man and writer…
In 2008 my wife and I held the first Stratford International Festival of Literature over a weekend at the Shakespeare Hotel. It was an experiment of sorts (for us any way)to see how a group of writers, brought together for a long weekend in a splendid, and rather ancient hotel might get along, as well as talk about themselves and their work to a paying audience who, afterwards could have a drink with them in the hotel’s bar and talk some more.
It worked very well indeed, with conversations extending long into the night, which was also good for the hotel’s bar takings, with no fears for the writers about getting home, although Hilary and I did have to stagger to our flat(just around the corner) when everyone else had safely gone to bed in the early hours.
Our list of writers included, amongst others, the novelist Catherine O’Flynn, who’d just won the Costa Prize for a first novel, the Irish/Canadian playwright, Brian Gordon Sinclair, whose staging of his play Hemingway’s Hot Havana was a loud and scary hit. Then there was the writer, wine merchant and jazz drummer, Sebastian Peake, who spoke about his father, the novelist and artist Mervyn Peake; Gary Killworth, an ex-RAF wireless operator (I think that’s what he was), who has written great novels about the Crimean War, and the 19th…
