Slam Dunk!

It's been described as "a cult cabaret club of words, music and all things intersected" and it's the latest craze to hit literary London: the Book Slam. The event has its origins in the slam poetry scene and the concept is simple: authors known and unknown read extracts from their work and DJs and bands play in between.



"It's just like a night down the pub, only with story-telling thrown in," is the way that Patrick Neate who started the Book Slam at his London bar Cherry Jam described it. And it isn't the great unpublished unknowns that turn up to read there: the venue has attracted hip established writers such as Jonathan Coe, Hari Kunzru and Nick Hornby, presumably looking for new ways to present their work and new audiences.


Toby Litt has a go!

Think it would catch on here? My bet is that it would. The combination of words and music is a sure-fire crowd puller. Last year during the Litfest I felt that the most exciting happenings actually took place in the bar in the evenings, especially on the evening of the superb Songwriter's Round.

It drew one of the biggest crowds the bar had seen - and many of those who turned up to listen and enjoy the readings were folks who'd never usually pick up a book from one year's end to the next.

Time to do something like this again methinks. Our literary scene could do with an infusion of hip.