In June last year we commissioned fifty leading writers for children and adults to write short stories or essays, all on the theme of ‘Elsewhere’, which we've been releasing over the past few months. As the project draws to a close, we thought we'd celebrate the magnificent stories we've received with a mini online festival featuring exclusive podcasts with some of our Elsewhere authors, interviews, teachers' resources, reading group guides and host our first ever Twitter interview with author Marcus Sedgwick. As Elsewhere is all about trying something new, doing something a bit different, we thought this an excellent way to go out in style.
Elsewhere is about stories - the beauty of the open endedness of the Elsewhere brief is that the only stipulation was that it had to be about somewhere else. It could be a work of poetry, fiction or non-fiction. There's been a huge variety of responses to the brief. Louise Welsh has written about a girl in a coma and what it's like to be trapped in your own body, Barry Hutchison's is about life after death and Joan Lingard's is a piece of non-fiction about her own experience of going into the Soviet Union before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Each story from the fifty manages to capture the idea of being foreign, being different, of being somewhere unfamiliar.We will be hosting a Q&A with Marcus Sedgwick on Saturday 2nd April, 12 noon on Twitter. That's where you come in! Please send your questions in advance to our @edbookfest account so that we can put them to Marcus on the day. Or, if you prefer, you can pose your queries in real time - and we'll do our best to get through them all. Either way, it's going to be an exhilarating adventure that will bring our Elsewhere journey to a thrilling conclusion.
Thanks to Scottish Government's Festivals Expo fund for making this project possible.
