BOOKMARK Book Festival
Perthshire's Book Festival
BOOKMARK 2025
Fascinating women to the fore at BOOKMARK Meet the Author event
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Victoria MacKenzie and Sean Lusk at the BOOKMARK Meet the Author session.
Image courtesy of Clare McMicking / CraicN Communications
Award-winning writers Sean Lusk and Victoria MacKenzie provided a fascinating insight to the lives of three historical women to an enthralled audience at the BOOKMARK event on Saturday, May 3rd.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe were the focus of discussion at the Meet the Author session in Blairgowrie which was attended by around 40 people.
Sean Lusk is the author of A Woman of Opinion, a fictionalised account of the life of 18th century English aristocrat, medical pioneer, writer and poet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, while Victoria MacKenzie’s debut novel For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain imagines the spiritual conversations between two 15th century women, Julian of Norwich - who wrote the first known book by a woman in the English language - and Margery, whose dictated story is the first known autobiography in English by a man or a woman.
Both Sean and Victoria were delighted with the success of the event.
Victoria said: “It was a really lovely afternoon and I was delighted to attend. The audience were wonderful - very engaged - and they asked lots of interesting questions, and it was great to talk about these three extraordinary women with Sean as well.”
Sean added: “BOOKMARK is a great festival, very well organised, and I was very pleased to have been invited to talk with Victoria at this event.
Book festivals are hugely important for towns and Blairgowrie is very lucky to have such an adventurous festival as BOOKMARK – the committee really try to mix things up and are to be commended on that.
The hard-working BOOKMARK volunteers are very welcoming and deserve a huge ‘well done’ for everything they are doing for Blairgowrie.”
The Meet the Author session was followed by BOOKMARK’s AGM. Speaking at the AGM, Gail thanked Sean and Victoria for an involving discussion, before looking back at the previous 12 months and ahead to the coming year.
She said: “BOOKMARK had another good year in 2024.
We had a sell-out event at Perth Theatre with Alexander McCall Smith and Magnus Linklater just before our October festival, and the main festival itself had good audience numbers with many new faces.
As well as our programme of Meet the Author events throughout the year and the BOOKMARK festival in October, we also run Authors In Schools sessions and the BOOKMARK Book of The Year Award, we sponsor a prize at Blairgowrie High School for short story writing, and visit local nursing homes to share poetry – all of which is part of efforts to ensure that people from age 5 to 95 can enjoy reading, being read to, writing and talking about books, stories, poems and literature.
We don’t rest on our laurels and try to do something different each year. This year we’re having an event for children at Blairgowrie Library on Saturday, June 21st with Alistair Chisholm, writer of the popular Dragonstorm books and featuring a craft workshop run by local not-for-profit organisation Nest Creative Spaces, and we are inviting new guests and chairs to our October event, the programme for which will be revealed at our Ticket Launch on Saturday, July 19th.
We can only do all of this thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, funders, our members and ticket sales, for which we are very grateful.”
BOOKMARK has just received some news from Philip Parris
who is returning to Perth in June
for more information, please click here
BOOKMARK and Blairgowrie Library
are very happy to announce a brand new event
especially for children in P3 - P5
The Dragonstorm Workshop
with
award-winning author
Alastair Chisholm
This event will take place in the Library
Lesley Street, Blairgowrie PH10 6AW
on Saturday 21 June at 1.30
read more
followed by
BOOKMARK 2025 Launch
with
Carys Davies
all details are available here
BOOKMARK's BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
all titles are available here
Kate Davies' book recommendations for May are here
Gail's Pre-Theatre Talks are back! for more information, click here
Background:
BOOKMARK established in 2012, has developed a reputation for being a friendly, well organised Book Festival which offers a wide range of events to suit all interests.
BOOKMARK Countdown
Our Next Event:
Saturday 21 June
Dragonstorm Workshop - Cancelled
Location: Blairgowrie Library PH10 6AW
More info >>
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