The London Word Festival team have put up loads of wonderful pictures from that seminal evening of entertainment, Keep Printing and Carry On at STK. Darren Hayman, Jo Neary, and Murray Macaulay all in collaboration with the Henningham Family Press. And if that wasn’t enough, Universettee with guest mini-lecturers Sophie Mackay and David Barnes…

Pictures

Chip Shop on stage before broadcast

Making preparations with Ian McMillan and the producer

Simon Armitage choosing his Chip Shop word; ‘homunculus’

Ian McMillan’s ‘the Verb’ on BBC Radio 3 has accompanied my news blackout of the last few months. I quit listening to or reading about current affairs after I realised it was mostly bad news, not ‘bad’ in the gloomy sense but rather the ‘inaccurate’. So it was fun to realise while listening to the show that he was the man we would be workin with on the London Word Festival official poster for 2010. We’re very pleased with the result.

Here is a review of his work by Lauren Romano:

We all shuffle up and take a pew as the proceedings begin. First up, specially commissioned poet Ian McMillan takes to the stage to perform the festival’s official Chip Shop Poem. McMillan gets things off to a flying start as his thickly laden Yorkshire glottal stops spurt out from his mouth at break neck speed. By the time we actually get to the Chip Shop poem, The Epic Friday Night Travels of Norman McNorman I am in a mild state of hysterics and so unfortunately can’t recall the finer details, but it’s very funny, ingenious and has something to do with a man called Norman and a late night trip to the Chip Shop. Hats off to Ian who manages to get the words ‘pigeon’, ‘fusspot’, ‘crepuscular’, ‘incandescent’, ‘hopscotch’, and ‘jump’ along with other maverick mots into a well-rhymed jumble with a particularly good last line involving the word ’spatula’.

Copies are on sale from the London Word Festival.

An interview of us in Le Cool Magazine.

You can read an article by Nancy Groves here about us in the independent about the Chip Shop project for the London Word Festival or see a scan of the print version through the thumbnail below:

The Guardian books blog has written a round-up of the London Word Festival, joining the words ‘Family’, ‘Press’ and ‘Henningham’ to the word ‘Fantastic’. You can read it here

A blog called the first pint has also written up a report of the Chip Shop at Dalston’s Red Art Cafe here

Lauren Laverne has been championing the London Word Festival on BBC6 Music, one of our favourite stations, especially making mention of the Chip Shop. She also writes for Grazia magazine and here we are again:

your local family press mentioned between Sandra Bullock and Drew Barrymore? Apparently.

I was going to put up some pics from the Chip Shop’s first outing at the London Word Festival Launch Party on Wednesday night, but the LWF team beat me to it!

So here’s a taster shot:

And if you want to see some more pics, click here.

You can read about our preperations for this year’s festival on the LWF website here

David Helbich (second from left) recently gave an email interview here with Eirik from Oslo’s Ultima Festival about our plans and the shared interests that drive the InterInterInter collaboration.