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28th September 2023

The readers at our 28th September 2023 meeting:

June Cluett

  • June read an extract, Arriving in the Bahamas, from her memoir about life as an artist living aboard a yacht.
  • June grew up in South Africa and has subsequently lived all over the world, including long spells in the USA and Singapore, as well as ten years spent aboard a sailing yacht, about which she gives talks.
  • June is one of the founders of Wylye Valley Writers.
  • She is a writer, poet, memoirist, painter and sculptor. June shows her visual art locally and has exhibited, sold and been commissioned internationally.  Find out more about June’s art from her website.

Grace Gauld

  • Grace read three poems from her book Hinterland, including the title poem.  Rose Flint said of this collection “Gauld writes with the precise balance of thoughtfulness and observation, describing an emotional connection to the natural world which beguiles, drawing the reader into her vision.”
  • Drawing much of her inspiration from Scotland where she grew up, Grace is a published poet who has performed at numerous events, including the Edinburgh Fringe, poetry festivals and bookshops across the country.
  • She is an experienced workshop leader and was co-facilitator of Salisbury Poetry Café.
  • Her poetry has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.
  • Much of Grace’s poetry is inspired by place and the landscape and people of Dundee.  She finds inspiration in art, human interaction, the normal everyday life, her poetry, described by Dawn Gorman as being a mixture of the real and the imagined.

Tarn Richardson

  • Tarn read an extract from his book The Damned in which he described the character of the creepy and frightening inquisitor, Tacit.
  • Tarn Richardson is the author of The Darkest Hand trilogy, a series of books set in World War One and published by Duckworth Overlook in the UK and USA, and Sonatine Editions in France.
  • He is an author who likes to blend historical settings, gritty realism, and supernatural elements, to create vivid, ambiguous characters. The carefully researched settings help to explore the complex interplay between good and evil, history with the present, and also the physical and the spiritual.
  • Notoriously slow at finishing manuscripts, he is still writing his current one, a modern day Jack the Ripper thriller, almost ten years after starting it.
  • More about Tarn and his books can be found on his website.

Gwendoline Silburn

  • Gwendoline read a dystopian story The Price of Freedom, set in a future were a corporation has replaced workhouses and the debtors prison.
  • Gwendoline has a degree in community drama and works with both young girls and  women within the Guiding Movement, a natural move for an ex-Girl Guide.
  • She grew up in Wiltshire, spending a childhood either reading fantasy fiction or writing her own stories.  Her first chosen genre was fantasy, although Gwendoline is now exploring the world of dystopian fiction. She uses “real world” prompts to make her work sound authentic but then skews the following action to make the reader really consider what happens next.
  • Gwendoline prefers to play with storytelling, sometimes using music or lyrics as a guide to fix characters or plot. Her narrators are not always people, or even reliable, they may even fail to follow key plot details within their own story. Readers need to pay keen attention.
  •  Like many other writers she rarely considers a piece finished, and to date Gwendoline has been too self-critical to submit to competitions or publishing sites. This is about to change.

William Graham

  • William read a short story In the Bookshop, which is about a man and a women eyeing each other up as they move around that setting.
  • William is one of the founders of Wylye Valley Writers.
  • William has always been fascinated everything to do with space.  He wrote his first book at the age of eleven about the Apollo ten mission, and he heard ‘the Eagle has landed’ late at night while on scout camp in Grovely Wood. 
  • More recently he has written a trilogy of novels, Alpha System, about the first voyage of humans to another star system, which is based on hard science. 
  • As well as working on his next novel and contemporary short stories, he has been writing book reviews which are published on WJGBookReview.com.

After the event, audience members chatting with the readers and perusing some of their books.

 Our thanks to Noeline Smith for all the photographs on this page.  For more about her work see her website.