Autumn
Welcome to the Alpine Fellowship Journal Autumn Edition.
This month, we’ve been pleased to share some of our prize winners work, which you can now view and read on our website, we’re also launching an exciting new collaboration with a new theatrical initiative and we’re congratulating a long-time fellow on her first feature film. And, as if that wasn’t enough, we’re also spotlighting one of our favourite talks from our past year’s events and we’ve got brand new reading recommendations from two of our Writing Prize judges. So, if you’re stuck for reading, we’ve got your covered!
Enjoy!
Alpine Fellowship x The Outsiders Project
We’re proud to reveal a new way in which we’re supporting developing artists and initiatives - through collaboration.
Our first collaboration is with The Outsiders Project, a fantastic initiative founded by writer and our advisory board member Nell Leyshon. The project gives voice to the unheard and marginalised through working with outsider artists and supporting their creativity. Their vision is to show that people side lined from society can write, perform and create work at the highest level.
We’ll have more updates on this project later in the year, but we couldn’t be more proud to be helping this wonderful project to happen in such a challenging time for live arts.
Featured Talk
We’re shining the spotlight onto one of our most popular talks: Andrew Graham Dixon on The Spiritual in Art from our 2016 event in Venice. If you don’t already know him, Andrew Graham-Dixon is one of the leading art critics and presenters of arts television in the English-speaking world. He has a long history of public service in the field of the visual arts, having judged the Turner Prize, the BP National Portrait Prize and the Annual British Animation Awards, among many other prizes. He has served on the Government Art Collection Committee, the Hayward Advisory Committee, and is currently a member of the board of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.
Written and Directed by Jessica Swale
We’ve been proud to have playwright, screenwriter and director Jessica Swale speak at several of our past events. Her debut feature film SUMMERLAND was recently released in selected cinemas and on streaming platforms.
It’s a beautiful film, wonderfully written and a moving story, perfect autumn viewing. So, if you find yourself looking for a little autumn entertainment, seek out Summerland, you won’t regret it.
What have we been reading?
Autumn and winter are perfect time for cosying up with a book, so to help you find some good reading material we asked two of our Writing Prize judges what they’ve been reading in the last few weeks.
Katherine Rundell - Children’s Author and Advisory Board Member
The book I have loved most this last year is Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood. It’s a memoir about her family, and in particular her father, an Evangelical Catholic priest: but it’s also about writing and romance and poetry. It’s so clever and sharp and wise and warm and original you gasp reading it, and so funny you feel you might die of it.
John Burnside - Poet, Novelist and Writing Prize Judge
I find that, as I grow older, I read less fiction and more history, but I make a huge exception for Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, an extraordinary book built around Till Eulenspiegel, Europe's most intriguing trickster figure, in which history, myth and a Rabelasian elan vital combine to draw us into a world of play, philosophical questioning and rolling conundrums that, in spite, or perhaps because of its historical setting is vividly relevant to our present political and moral dilemmas.
Alpine Fellowship Theatre Prize 2020 - Update
Usually the winner of our Theatre Prize would travel to our symposium to see their winning play performed in a rehearsed reading, usually with a rather excellent cast. In the past, we’ve been treated to performances by actors like Phoebe Fox, Andrew Knott, Dominque Tipper, Nick Blood and Imogen Doel. But, as this year symposium was cancelled, we had to find a new way to showcase our prize winning play. We’ve settled on a rehearsed reading in London in December. Currently our winner, Sue Bevan is working with award-winning director Blanche McIntyre to develop the play and we can’t wait to see it.
We’ll update you on this in the next edition of the Journal.
We briefly chatted with Sue to explore what winning this prize meant to her.
SUE BEVAN - Theatre Prize Winner
What does it mean to you to win the Alpine Fellowship?
It means a tremendous amount. Maybe even more in a time of COVID than at any other, and maybe more for me than you can realise. As a working-class ‘emerging’ writer in my sixties it is extremely difficult to get work into theatres. In 2020 this has become impossible - for everyone, not just those of us in disadvantaged or marginalised groups. As lockdown continued around the world, it was easy to become disheartened, and I did. There were days when I asked myself why I even bothered to wake up and write, or edit. Was it time to hang up my shoes and don my slippers, pick up knitting needles and start to crochet pasta? Clearly the answer was no, because I can’t envisage myself ever walking up and not wanting to be creative, and in my case that is through placing one word on the page, then another, and just continuing to do the same until it’s time to move them around, throw some out, squeeze some up a little closer together, getting them to ‘cwtch up’ as we Welsh say. But writing is a solitary business and, for the most part for most people, it generates little by way of critical recognition, opportunities for collaboration, or financial reward. This prize has provided all of these and much, much more.
That’s all for now
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