Tag Archives: Fiction

Events

Wednesday 30th August 2023: Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman

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On Wednesday 30th August 2023, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will discuss Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman. Noughts and Crosses is described as Young Adult fiction – this is the first time we’ve read such a book. It’s fitting to link to the BBC Bitesize intro page, which summarises the book as “a novel set in a dystopian Britain in which society is divided by racism. Dark-skinned Crosses are privileged in society over the light-skinned noughts. Against the odds, the main characters, Sephy and Callum, fall in love across the divide which leads them into danger. Malorie Blackman was inspired by real events from history and her own life when she wrote this novel.”

As usual we’ll discuss what we made of the book and how it might be relevant to us in our own lives. SRRG regular Asha will introduce the book for us. At this session, we’ll also provide a quick introduction to Stroud Radical Reading Group – mentioning the books we’ll be reading later in the year and providing a quick history of books we’ve read in the past. We enourage people to read the book but you are also welcome even if you haven’t read the book – to listen to the discussion and ask questions.

On this webpage you can find details to buy the book at a discount, free resources, and information about the author, the book, how our sessions work, and the venue. We’ll be in a new venue this month – the SISTER Summer School – an empty building Stroud in Internationalist Solidarity Together for Earth Repairs (SISTER) have reclaimed on Lansdown Road.

The book is available from Yellow Lighted Bookshop for £8.99, and you should be able to get a 12% discount: after adding the book to your ‘basket’, view your basket where there is an option to enter a ‘Coupon code’. Add the code “StroudRadical23” and click/tap “Apply coupon”.

Freely available resources related to the book are available below. We like to ensure everyone can attendee our sessions and get something out of them even if they can’t afford to buy a copy of the book or the time to read it. We would encourage people to read/listen to as much as possible, but you are welcome to attend and listen along even if you are unable to engage with any of the below.

Free resources

About the author and the book

Malorie Blackman has written over seventy books for children and young adults, including the Noughts & Crosses series. Many of her books have also been adapted for stage and television, including a BAFTA-award-winning BBC production of Pig-Heart Boy and a Pilot Theatre stage adaptation by Sabrina Mahfouz of Noughts & Crosses. In 2005 Malorie was honoured with the Eleanor Farjeon Award in recognition of her distinguished contribution to the world of children’s books. In 2008 she received an OBE for her services to children’s literature, and between 2013 and 2015 she was the Children’s Laureate. Most recently Malorie wrote for the Doctor Who series on BBC One, and the fifth novel in her Noughts & Crosses series, Crossfire, was published by Penguin Random House Children’s in summer 2019.

Published twenty years ago last year, Malorie Blackman’s ‘Noughts & Crosses’ broke the hearts of a generation of teenage readers, and its influence on Young Adult fiction can be felt across the genre with the themes of racism, diversity and conflict still as pertinent in this era of Black Lives Matter as they were when the series was first published.

Endorsements:

‘The Noughts & Crosses series are still my favourite books of all time and showed me just how amazing story-telling could be’ – Stormzy

‘The most original book I’ve ever read’ Benjamin Zephaniah

‘Unforgettable’ Guardian

Events

Summer Fiction Reading: Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

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Our Summer Fiction reading for 2020 is Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. The discussion will be held online on Wednesday 26th August.

We will meet to discuss the text from 7.30-9.30pm. Please register to access details of the video call via Eventbrite.

A member of our group, Dawid Majer, has selected Tokarczuk’s book Flights for us to read – and will introduce it. The book was originally published in Polish in 2007 – and, in English translation by Jennifer Croft, won the Man Booker International prize in 2018. For a brief introduction, this article covers Tokarczuk’s work. This article also covers the awarding of the 2019 Nobel prize for literature to Tokarczuk.

Another article covers Flights specifically, summarising: “In Flights, she meditates on travel and human anatomy, moving between stories including the Dutch anatomist who discovered the Achilles tendon when dissecting his own amputated leg, and the tale of Chopin’s heart as his sister transported it from Paris to Warsaw”.

decorative - cover of book

Events

Speculative Fiction, 28th August 2019

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August’s session will be on Speculative Fiction – it will be on a Wednesday 28th August, 7.30-9.30pm at Black Book Cafe.
We will focus on two short stories:
 
“Will the Circle be Unbroken?” by Henry Dumas and
“Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler.
Download both stories in this pdf (which also features a short afterword in the case of Butler’s story).
The stories have been selected by Ronnie McGrath, a former Creative Writing Director at the University of the Arts, who currently teaches speculative fiction at Imperial College London. Ronnie is also the author of two poetry collections, Gumbo Talk (2010) and Data Trace (2010), the novel On the Verge of Losing It (2005), and the chapbook, Poems from the Tired Lips of Newspapers (2003). He has work in IC3, The Penguin Book of New Black
Writing in Britain, Filigree (2018), and the anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered (2017). Ronnie is also a painter, who has held a solo exhibition at Goldsmiths College and the Commonwealth Institute (2018), and spoken at Bristol University on the subject of “The Consciousness of Black Art”.
The stories are both from larger collections – which you may wish to read more of over the summer (though our discussion will remain focused on the two stories, which will be more than enough to discuss over 2 hours):
Dumas’ story is included in Dark Matter II: Reading the Bones (2004), which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology in 2005.
Butler’s is part of her own collection Bloodchild and other stories (1995 / 2005 edition with two additional stories). The title story won the Hugo Award and Nebula Award.
Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend but we ask for a donation of £2-3 from anyone who can afford it to cover venue costs. Please contact us about any accessibility requirements. We aim to make the sessions a welcoming space for anyone interested in the topic, you do not need to have a university education or have ever been to a reading group before, and we even welcome people who have not read the text but would like to listen! Please contact us if you have any questions.