Oct 20 – Boyd Tonkin Delivers Gibraltar Lecture
Journalist and Booker Prize judge Boyd Tonkin delivered the Gibraltar Lecture this afternoon at the Convent on the first day of the Gibraltar International Literary Festival.
Entitled “Writers in the Shadow of the Rock?” his talk focused on the role that Gibraltar has played in fiction, poetry and history.
The lecture was introduced by the Chief Minister Fabian Picardo who said that the annual festival “served as an inspiration” to those around him. He said the Rock was “a place of history that is a perfect setting for any story.”
Mr Tomkin expanded on the various literary representations of Gibraltar ranging from Greek mythology to the recent spy thriller of John le Carré.
He said that Gibraltar had struck writers as both a geographically small world and a culturally large world which welcomed people of different creeds and races.
The Rock was seen as both a “defensive and expansive” place which he said had appeared to many 18th and 19th Century travellers as a “strange mixture between a fort and a souk.”
He concluded with a reading from the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy that ends James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The Literary Festival continues until Sunday. Check out http://www.gibraltarliteraryfestival.com for more info.
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