Last time we went off to Romania; this time around we’re heading to the second-most populated country in the world – so there are lots of stories to tell – and a fascinating cultural mecca: India. Over to our Events and Publications Intern Michael McGrath to give the lowdown…

India. The name alone can stir one’s imagination. It’s not difficult to conjure up images of the country’s warmth and charm: vibrant, colourful landscapes; fresh, exotic foods; the beaming smiles of passing children. What lies beneath these familiar images and sensations, however, is an incredibly diverse country. There is an ever-increasing gap between the urban rich – in cities like Mumbai and Delhi – and the rural poor that make up the majority, for example. Cultural differences also exist between the many different religious groups that coexist in the country. But perhaps it is India’s astounding array of languages that is its most divisive feature.

Charles de Gaulle once asked of his native France, ‘how can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?’ If France’s plethora of all things fromage demonstrates its varied national identity, then surely it is India’s profusion of languages that gives one a sense of its magnificently diverse population. There are at least 1652 languages in use in India today, with the government recognising 112 mother tongues that have more than 10,000 speakers.

The lingua francas for most Indians are Hindi and English, but it is the latter that has flourished in recent decades. India’s emergence on the world stage (including its membership to the G20) has given the country a more outward-looking identity, with English becoming the language of the educated, the prosperous, and the aspirational. A 1997 survey by India Today magazine estimated that about a third of the country’s population of more than one billion could hold a conversation in English. This linguistic trend has had an undeniably large effect on Indian culture, particularly its literature.

A new wave of Indian novelists and poets writing in English has materialised in the last few decades. Not only have these writers created an exciting new branch of English literature, but they are also receiving some of the most coveted accolades in literature for their efforts. The Nobel Prize in Literature, for example, has recognised Indian writers, awarding Rabindranath Tagore, V.S. Naipaul and Indian-born Rudyard Kipling honours for their works. In the last fifteen years three Indian writers have received the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Literature: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008).

This recent success has revitalised the literary scene in India. Jaipur, the famously pink city in the middle of the Rajasthan desert, has held an incredibly popular literature festival since 2006 – attracting the likes of Tina Brown, Ian McEwan and Oprah Winfrey.

Perhaps one of the most famous pieces of fiction to emerge from India in recent years is Salman Rushdie’s much-lauded Midnight’s Children. The book begins with the story of the Sinai family and the birth of its newest member. Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, at the precise moment of India’s independence, Saleem Sinai is celebrated in this new country and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself. But this coincidence of birth has consequences for Saleem, namely: telepathic powers that connect him with 1,000 other ‘midnight’s children’ – all born in the first hour of India’s independence.

Saleem, using his telepathic powers, assembles a Midnight Children’s Conference, bringing hundreds of ethnically diverse children together while also attempting to discover the meaning of their gifts. It is also at a time when Saleem’s family begin a number of migrations, and witness a number of the violent outbreaks that cripple the subcontinent during its separation. Saleems’s path in life mirrors India’s varied fortunes during this period, allowing Rushdie to examine the effects of colonialism, independence, and partition.

Midnight’s Children has won a host of literary awards, including The Man Booker Prize in 1981. In addition, to celebrate its twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversaries, the Booker Prize presented Midnight’s Children with ‘The Booker of Bookers’ and the ‘Best of the Bookers’ awards respectively.

Rushdie’s magnum opus is but one example of the many great works that have emerged from India since the country’s independence. What links the majority of these works is their ability to challenge long-held assumptions, confront difficult issues, but also enthral readers with their exquisite language and beautiful verse. If Midnight’s Children heralded a renaissance in Indian writing, then the future of Indian literature (and indeed world literature) is looking rather exciting.

If you think capitalism’s bad – mass privatisation, rising inequality, BT adverts – then, before you decide to collectivise your land, buy a tractor and denounce your next-door neighbour to the Securitate, you might first want to read Herta Muller’s The Land of Green Plums, set in 1970s Romania during Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist dictatorship. Muller was an eyebrow-raising (i.e. not Philip Roth) winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, but LGP’s unflinching depiction of the everyday horrors and banalities of life under the regime is enough to silence any Anglophone complaints about the supposed eccentricities of the awarding committee.

The novel, largely autobiographical, is told from the perspective of a female German-Romanian student who, along with her three male friends, comes to the attention of the secret police and is subjected to harassment, spying and interrogation. The sparse and sometimes enigmatic narration convincingly captures the psychological effects of living within a strictly circumscribed reality, in which individual thought and expression are oppressed.

It’s not a barrel of laughs – the narrative is driven largely by suicide, madness and despair – but the narrator, at once jaded and unworldly, gives the prose a captivating, deadpan quality: her ‘heart-beast’ leaps out of her chest and onto the floor; she observes her ex-SS father hacking at the ‘damn stupid plants’ in the garden; the factory workers in the city produce ‘tin sheep’ and ‘wooden melons’ with their provincial hands. LGPs could be read as a realist counterpart to George Orwell’s 1984, inhabiting a similar world in which your best friend can be your worst enemy, and in which the present tyranny seems to stretch on forever.

Self-expression and independent thought are virtually impossible in The Land of Green Plums, but the characters in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros face identity issues of a more extreme variety – namely, that everyone starts turning into rhinoceroses. First performed in Paris in 1960, seven years after the premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the two main characters in this play don’t have to wait around very long for a mystical appearance. A rhino comes crashing down the street, trampling a cat but leaving the Sunday-afternoon ennui largely intact: one character, asked what he thinks of the incident, remarks, ‘Well … nothing … it made a lot of dust …’

Soon, however, everyone’s at it, and the chaos and destruction intensify; the moral recrimination begins and the remaining humans form a mini-resistance to the violent occupation. The meaning of the play would have been fairly unambiguous to a Parisian audience in 1960, sixteen years after the end of the Nazi occupation of the city; the characters often speak in terms of collaboration and betrayal (‘I never would have thought it of him – never!’), whilst allowing themselves to give in to denial and resignation (‘we must move with the times!’).

Typically of absurdist theatre, the nightmarish and the comic are combined: in one horrific scene, which looks back to Kafka’s Metamorphosis and forward to David Cronenberg’s The Fly, the character Berenger witnesses his best friend Jean turning into a rhinoceros; rapidly turning green and becoming hoarse, he renounces humanist values and cries out for ‘The swamps! The swamps!’ Later on, Berenger recognises the straw boater pierced on the horn of a recently transformed ex-human: ‘The Logician … a rhinoceros!!!’ ‘He’s still retained a vestige of his old individuality,’ observes his colleague of the disembodied head bobbing along the orchestra pit.

The characters in the play summon several discourses – logical, legal, medical, relativist – in order to explain and come to terms with their bizarre predicament, but all are shown to be inadequate. Where Rhinoceros ends with a flourish of humanistic defiance, however, no such consolation is offered in the work of the philosopher E. M. Cioran, who in his A Short History of Decay (1949) blames the human inclination toward belief and fanaticism for the sufferings of the world. Such nihilistic sentiments were probably not uncommon after the Second World War, especially if you’d spent most of the 1930s in Germany describing yourself as a ‘Hitlerist’ and expressing your support for the fascist Iron Guard back home. ‘Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his ideas into a god the consequences are incalculable,’ he writes after the war.

For those of us who embrace nihilism as a convenient excuse to sit around shrugging our shoulders and eating crisps, Cioran comfortingly assures us that ‘ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart,’ which, if true, certainly adds a sheen of philosophical respectability to watching Jeremy Kyle on a grey Tuesday afternoon. If you are feeling ennui-stricken and missing the rumble of rhinoceros hooves or of time tearing itself apart, then you could do worse than read Andrei Codrescu’s The Posthuman Dada Guide, written in the playful and subversive spirit of the movement that it celebrates.

The Romanian Tristan Tzara was one of the founders of Dadaism, which came to prominence during World War I – a time when ‘like a spectator watching splendid mannequins being outfitted for the evening by a tailor (Mr. History), Romania gathered the leftover scraps to make its own, rather improvised, suit from the elegant remnants,’ according to Codrescu, referring to its post-war acquisition of Transylvania and Bessarabia and resultant cultural variety. Like Cioran, the Dada artists and writers saw the modern world as inherently meaningless, but they celebrated rather than mourned this fact (which is possibly the crucial – if in this case achronological – difference between postmodernism and modernism). Romanian writers in the twentieth century seem constantly to be staring absurdity in the face, as Europe cracks up and realigns itself, then cracks up again; Romania joined the EU, with its promise of stability, in 2007, and may find itself caught in this cycle once more.

This was one of those book purchases that falls into my – or should I say ‘the,’ perhaps others will empathise – ‘I didn’t know anything about it but it just attracted me’ category. Its procurement from an obscure charity shop made my acquisition all the more mysterious, and the subsequent life experience that the book spilled perhaps seemed even more significant as a result of the lack of any prior knowledge  or preconceptions on my part.  I bought it in the summer holiday between the second and third year of my degree studies, one of the slightly unsettling and thrilling periods of time as a student in which I suddenly had bit of space to read what I wanted, and time to do so. My reading habits have always benefitted from a change of scene, and so back at my family home I sped through the pages of Guo’s novel, which tells the story of Zhuang (or ‘Z,’ as she introduces herself to others, anticipating the mispronunciation of her full name) who is sent from China to London by her parents to learn English.

Indeed, the change of scene I was subject to in moving home for the summer is somewhat incomparable to the experience of Z, who is thrust into the bustle and unfamiliarity of the unaccommodating capital city. Z’s narrative voice is a reflection of her own broken English and journey towards fluency, and although this aspect could potentially jar with some readers, for me it only served to make the book all the more compelling. Any novel that breaks away from conventional prose has often already won half the battle in endearing me just through doing so. Remarking upon the complexities of grammar, Z contests that in China, ‘We are bosses of our own language.’ But the narrative that is delivered undeniably presents her as very much in charge of English, too, albeit in a non-standard way. The unconventional word combinations and comments on everything from baked beans to the pub make the book what it is – an original, amusing, bittersweet understanding of the world and a chapter of a life.

At the centre of the novel is what is essentially a love story between Z and an –interestingly – an unnamed man. This is interwoven with snippets of Chinese history and culture, often told through Z’s accounts and recollections of her family and their life. I particularly liked the structure of the novel, with each chapter title an excerpt/definition from Z’s precious Chinese-English dictionary, which the following chapter is linked to in some way. Through this, the novel explores the relationship between rules, ideas and definitions on the one hand, and real life situations on the other, as Z’s perception of the world expands and is challenged. I found it difficult to bear witness to this, fictional though it may be, and not be prompted to re-assess my own perceptions and understanding on some level, too – one of the many powerful things that reading can do.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Xiaolu Guo, Chatto and Windus (2007)

We last left off by taking a trip to the literary hotbed (or should that be hot geyser?) that was Iceland – now Liverpool Hope University Reader-in-Residence Charlotte Weber acts as our tour guide for the literary wonders of Israel.

‘The man decides to write a story about the situation. Not the political situation and not the social situation either. He decides to write a story about the human situation, the human condition. The human condition the way he’s experiencing it right now.’ –

from the opening of ‘Suddenly, a Knock on the Door’, by Etgar Keret.

As a nation occupied by ‘The People of the Book’, there is no way that Israel could fail to have a rich and provocative culture of reading. From the Bible and the legends of the Talmud, to modern-day Israeli and American authors, story-telling has always been an important part of Jewish life.

As far as literary culture goes, Israel is a nation that has had its fair share of complications and difficulties. To start with, there is the simple issue of language. As a mother tongue, Hebrew is spoken by just 8 million people worldwide (compare this to the 300 million people who speak Arabic, the language of those living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories within Israel), and the vast majority of this number are confined to those living within Israel itself. It is also a language that came dangerously close to extinction as a spoken form during the Middle Ages, until its revival as a spoken language during the 19th century.

Despite its complicated linguistic heritage and the tumultuous political relations with Palestine that continue to cause conflicts in the country, Israel has developed its own distinct literary legacy and boasts number of internationally recognised and celebrated authors. The best-known of these in recent times are undoubtedly the novelists Amos Oz and David Grossman.

Oz was born Amos Klausner in the country’s capital, Jerusalem, in 1939. The son of Russian immigrants, he later changed his last name to the Hebrew word for ‘strength’. After the suicide of his mother following years of depression, Oz left home at age 15 and joined a kibbutz in central Israel, where he remained for 31 years. It was during this time that he began to write and his debut novel, Where the Jackals Howl, was published in 1965.

Like most Israeli’s, Oz served in the Israeli Defence Forces as a young adult. He fought in the 1967 ‘Six-Day War’, then in the Yom Kippur war in 1973, both of which gave him a “gut hatred of war and fighting”. It was following these experiences that Oz became one of the first Israeli intellectuals to speak in favour of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Oz’s 2003 memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, in which he reflects upon, among other things, the early death of his mother, is the biggest-selling title in Israeli history.

Books filled our home. My father could read in sixteen or seventeen languages. My mother spoke four or five languages and read seven or eight … But the only language they ever taught me was Hebrew. Maybe they feared that a knowledge of languages would expose me too to the blandishments of Europe, that wonderful, murderous continent … Words like ‘meadow’, ‘cottage’, or ‘goose-girl’ excited and seduced me all through my childhood. They had a sensual aroma of a genuine, cosy world, far from the dusty tin roofs, the urban wasteland of scrap iron and thistles, the parched hillsides of our Jerusalem, suffocating under the weight of white-hot summer.

David Grossman is a prolific writer, having published novels for both adults and young readers, short stories, a play and collections of essays. Politically left-wing, Grossman is also an outspoken peace activist who has demonstrated against the expansion of the Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory. In particular, Grossman’s 2009 novel To the End of the Land, which was published 3 years after the death of his son Uri in the Israel-Lebanon war, received world-wide critical acclaim.

One of the biggest household names in Israeli literature at the moment, however, is the quirky and subversive Etgar Keret. The son of holocaust survivors, Keret’s unusual and often violent short stories have been printed in the New Yorker and The Guardian since his appearance on the literary scene in the 1990’s. He is credited with heralding a new kind of Israeli writing for a modern age – one that deals less with the political and social questions that have preoccupies Oz and Grossman, and more with the daily quirks and psychological dilemmas of the individual. His most recent collection of stories, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door was released by Chatto & Windus this February, and is reviewed in The Observer here.

Israel also has plenty in the way of literary offerings beyond its home-grown writers. The world-famous Jewish Book Week, celebrated its 60th anniversary in February this year, taking place in both Jerusalem and the vibrant Tel Aviv. The programme boasted contributors such as Simon Schama, Boyd Tonkin, Umberto Eco, Howard Jacobson and Etgar Keret. Tmol-Shilshom (Bookstore-Café) is a cultural gem tucked-away from the busy main streets of Jerusalem. Opened in 1994, this cosy café is a favourite among the Jerusalem literary and foodie scenes, with plenty on the menu to feed both the body and the brain (the cheesecake here is the best I have ever tasted!) It attracts plenty of literary figures as well as the general public – with Amos Oz and David Grossman both known to occupy tables here on a regular basis.

Throughout April, anyone can submit a line to the poem which starts with the lines ‘Tell me what you’re thinking, tell me what you miss/Tell me what you’re dreaming, tell me what you wish’. The result will be a poem that represents and unites a diverse global literary community, speaking for children across the world who want to belong to the world of words and reading.

To add a line to the poem, visit the LitWorld website - and go here to read the poem so far.

Over the past century life expectancy has dramatically increased, leading to a growing ageing population worldwide who face a number of distinct health challenges. The main issues for affecting older people’s health in all income groups over the world are noncommunicable diseases, which include heart disease, stroke and dementia – in 2010, there were 35.6 million people living with dementia globally and numbers are expected to double over the space of the next 20 years. Longer life expectancy also affects social structures and relationships and the need to increase participation in ‘age-friendly’ social environments has been identified by WHO as key for fostering good mental health and wellbeing amongst older people.

The Reader Organisation recognises the specific issues that affect the health of older people, and our important ongoing work with older people is helping to ensure that their levels of health, wellbeing and social participation are significantly improved as a result of regular shared reading. Our recent evaluation results for our Bupa Reader-in-Residence Pilot Project speak for themselves, but speaking volumes are the stories that come straight from the older people we work with.

TRO’s work with older people has also recently been highlighted by Living With Dementia, the monthly members magazine of the Alzheimer’s Society. Their March issue featured an article entitled ‘Reading for Pleasure’,  detailing the benefits of Get Into Reading in care home settings.

We’re spreading the benefits of shared reading even further amongst older people with the launch of our Merseyside Volunteer Reader Scheme, funded by the Big Lottery. Volunteers taking part in the project will be trained to take Get Into Reading to older people in care homes across Merseyside. We’re currently looking for volunteers in Wirral who may be experiencing mental ill health or unemployment to take part in the scheme as well as care homes in Wirral who want to run a volunteer-led reading group. For more information please visit our website or e-mail christinejohnson@thereader.org.uk

And because not only is today World Health Day, but also William Wordsworth’s 242nd birthday, what better way to celebrate than with a rather appropriate poem from the man himself…

Such Age, How Beautiful!

Such age, how beautiful! O Lady bright,
Whose mortal lineaments seem all refined
By favouring Nature and a saintly Mind
To something purer and more exquisite
Than flesh and blood; whene’er thou meet’est my sight,
When I behold thy blanched unwithered cheek,
Thy temples fringed with locks of gleaming white,
And head that droops because the soul is meek,
Thee with the welcome Snowdrop I compare;
That child of winter, prompting thoughts that climb
From desolation toward the genial prime;
Or with the Moon conquering earth’s misty air,
And filling more and more with crystal light
As pensive Evening deepens into night.

Last time we headed to Ireland to learn all about the most famous of saints; now it’s off to a country not that different in name but definitely a little further afield (and even colder): the Nordic European island country of Iceland.

In August 2011, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – better known as UNESCO – appointed its fifth City of Literature. Lining up alongside Edinburgh, Melbourne, Iowa City and Dublin as a centre of culture, creativity and above all, a beating heart of vibrant literary activity (of both writers and readers; past and present) is Reykjavik, the capital city of Iceland. The prestigious title is not given lightly; each City of Literature must be “dedicated to pursuing literature on a local level, engaging citizens in a dynamic culture of words” as well as representing literature on an international scale, establishing and creating literary links within all four corners of the world. That’s a lot of responsibility to take on, even for a nation of voracious readers.

It’s surprising that Reykjavik has not been awarded the accolade much sooner as if there was ever a city whose very foundations were built upon literature, then Reykjavik is it. Indeed the heritage of Iceland as a whole is tightly bound up with works that are considered to be landmarks of literature not only in their homeland but globally. The Sagas of Icelanders -Íslendingasögur as they are known in their mother tongue – have masterfully and rather spectacularly preserved the rich history of the country from its very beginnings, charting the migration, settlement, struggles and triumphs of the earliest inhabitants to Iceland. In turn, the Sagas intricate detail, breathtaking scope and – first and foremost – the great and timeless stories they tell have become just as significant a part of the country‘s heritage as the archiving of the ancestors that are recounted within.

Despite their almost overwhelming breadth – taking in events from the 10th and 11th century and being compiled as written volumes up until the 1500s – the Sagas are a perfect example of pure and exceptionally captivating storytelling, containing several key ingredients and plot twists that are central to any classic piece of literature, retaining all the excitement of fiction within a factual prose history. What makes the Sagas specifically as engaging and emphatic as the fire-and-ice country they are attached to is the fact their ‘characters‘ were all real, living, breathing people. More precisely they revolve around families; you don‘t have to watch Corrie or Eastenders to know that the family unit provides the biggest amounts of heartwarming joy and heartwrenching pain – and the Sagas certainly pack an incredibly dramatic punch. It isn‘t hard to chart the influence of the Sagas of Icelanders upon classic and modern literature alike; surely they are the predecessors of such legendary tales as Lord of The Rings (indeed, Tolkien admitted being greatly influenced by another bedrock of Icelandic literature, the vastly more mythological Poetic Edda) and the recent fantasy family-saga phenomenon A Song of Ice and Fire series. And as they‘ve been deemed “as tragic as Shakespeare, as colourful as The Canterbury Tales, as enduring as Beowulf, [and] as epic as The Iliad”, we can certainly see why the Sagas are regarded worldwide as a literary masterpiece, as enchanting and widely-read today as in centuries gone by.

Another factor that sets the Sagas of Icelanders apart from many vast historical texts that can be hard to get to grips with – instead marking them very much as something identifiable and real – comes with their presentation. Owing to the fact that before they were transcribed and put onto paper, they originated in the most traditional form of storytelling – being told and re-told through speech – the resulting prose has an untarnished clarity and straightforward narrative, making their drama all the more compelling. Icelandic literature has a particularly strong oral-based historical tradition, with both the Sagas and the aforementioned Poetic Edda being passed from generations through literal word of mouth. Iceland has been leading the way in read-aloud revolution for quite some time, and it has had quite an impact: it’s hardly a coincidence to learn that the Icelandic language is one of the most unchanged languages in the world, hardly transforming since the settlement of the Sagas’ protagonists in the country in the 9th century, and this is in large part due to the tradition of Icelandic literature being primarily spoken. The country’s literature – specifically the Sagas, read both in their original form and translated by various sources – goes hand in hand with its language, with each cultivating the other and the two put together cultivating a very strong sense of national identity and pride.

Even though Reykjavik is the heart of Iceland’s literary life – being home to the bi-annual and world renowned Reykjavik International Literary Festival, as well as the majority of Iceland’s publishing houses – a love of literature flows right through the country; hardly surprising when you consider the fact more books are written, published and sold per person per year in Iceland than in any other country in the world. To crunch numbers, five titles are published per every 1,000 Icelanders, double the rate for other Nordic countries [Source: Statistics Iceland; UNESCO]. Not only that, but on average it is estimated that one in ten Icelanders will go on to publish their very own work of literature in their lifetime. Impressive stats indeed, and one would suspect that there’s more than a few successors to Halldór Laxness and Ólafur Jóhann Sigurðsson in their midst.

Perhaps the nation’s affinity with literature in the modern day can be most closely linked to a yearly reading frenzy that is not specifically organised but has instead grown out of tradition and is now one of the most eagerly awaited reading-related events in the country. Iceland’s already booming publishing industry steps up a few more gears between October and December, heralding the lovely sounding ‘jólabokaflód’. This word translates to an idea that is even lovelier in concept, the Book-Flood-Before-Christmas (doesn’t it put images in your head of cascading waterfalls, gushing geysers and volcanos erupting with books rather than travel disrupting ash? Maybe that’s just me…). The pre-Christmas rush is big business everywhere but it’s in this time period that the city of Reykjavik is awash with a sea of books and all kinds of special events that help promote the act of reading, including writers being temporarily employed as shop assistants in bookstores and public readings taking place right across town. Given that books are clearly for life and not just for Christmas here (although they are the most popular Christmas present in the country), Reykjavik and Iceland as a whole most definitely deserves its award as a country flying the flag for literature love.

 “I, Patrick, a sinner, unlearned, resident in Ireland, declare myself to be a bishop. Most assuredly I believe that what I am I have received from God. And so I live among barbarians, a stranger and exile for the love of God.”

Patricks letter to Corneticus

Welcome to the next addition in our Readers of the World Series if you missed the last one click here.  A special one this as it happens to fall within the same week as St. Patrick ’s Day. So really could we have written about any country other than Ireland? Or any other man than Saint Patrick? (Naomh Padraig in Gaelic or Sanctus Patricius in Latin) Patrick’s celebration day has of course morphed from once being a holy catholic celebration day into another Secular holiday like many of the other Christian holidays (think Father Christmas and The Easter Bunny) By this logic Saint Patrick’s day has switched from being a celebration of a saint into the celebration of Irishness and Irish culture.

Now that’s not at all a bad thing, as it is by far and away the most celebrated national day of any country in the world (worldwide far bigger than Thanksgivings day in America or St. Georges Day in England….Or any others as far as I can think of)

So who was St. Patrick? Well he wasn’t Irish for a start. He was actually from either the north of England or Southern Scotland, and he was born into a wealthy family but obviously back then wealth didn’t stop the famous Niall of The Nine Hostages from doing what he done best….Kidnapping people! So Niall’s cohort brought the then Pagan Patrick back to Ireland where he was sold into slavery to a local landowner in Antrim.  

It was this time spent in slavery that swayed the young man’s heart towards the new Christian god and away from the native religion of his forefathers. Perhaps it was the lambs with which he herded, perhaps it was the silent mountains and long solitary days, either way his mind was shifted and he spent his long hours praying incessantly until one day he had a dream given by God and here is his own account (as written in his second letter confessions)

“And there one night I heard in my sleep a voice saying to me: `It is well that you fast, soon you will go to your own country.’ And again, after a short while, I heard a voice saying to me: `See, your ship is ready.’ And it was not near, but at a distance of perhaps two hundred miles, and I had never been there, nor did I know a living soul there; and then I took to flight, and I left the man with whom I had stayed for six years. And I went in the strength of God who directed my way to my good, and I feared nothing until I came to that ship.”

So he came to the ship and God has provided him with safe passage back to Britain. He was then kidnapped by a band of brigands for a further 2 months and upon escaping he wandered Europe for 7 years pondering who he was to the earth and what he was to become before deciding upon priesthood. Upon completion of his studies he returned to Britain to become a priest when he was struck by the second of his dreams, a voice spoke “We beseech thee, holy youth, to come and walk once more amongst us.” Patrick recognised this as the voice of the Irish and was now clear as to his purpose in life, converting Irish Pagans to Christianity.

Patrick on the hill of Tara overlooking the church

He was ordained as a Bishop and sent to Ireland with 26 followers upon the death of Palladius (the previous monk tasked with that job). Upon entering Ireland he knew he had to do something bold and to the high king of Ireland nothing was more bold than the lighting of the spring fire upon the hill of Tara before the kings own bonfire. The king was enraged and travelled to the hill with his bejewelled guards and self to find a humble cohort of faithful servants eager to share the news of the new religion… The king was impressed and so began a toppling over of religious ideals and mythology in Ireland that changed the world and did much to bring Europe out of the dark ages that were to come. It all started with a faithful man in rags on a symbolic hill, so think about that when you’re wearing a green t-shirt and drinking Guinness. As for the snakes? Let’s not argue on whether they were real snakes or symbolic Pagan snakes.

So there we have it the most colourful, musical, enjoyable, alcohol fuelled, worldwide, national celebration of any country in the whole world! What are you going to be doing this Saturday? Hopefully you aren’t sitting in watching Take Me Out hoping for some Paddy love when the real paddy love will be dotted around Liverpool’s glorious pubs and bars.

The fact remains that across the world there are at least 793 million people who are illiterate, shut off from the world of wonder reading holds. LitWorld, a global literacy organisation based in New York, founded World Read Aloud Day in March 2010 as an awareness movement advocating literacy as a fundamental right that belongs to all people, but also as a day to motivate children, teenagers and adults worldwide to celebrate the power of words, especially those words that are shared from one person to another. Since it was founded, World Read Aloud Day has gone from strength to strength; last year, World Read Aloud Day was celebrated in 60 countries and involved 200,000 participants. This year, the aim is to reach a million participants or more around the world, creating a global community of readers that educate, advocate and innovate when it comes to reading aloud, highlighting everyone’s right to access books.

For The Reader Organisation, reading aloud is not just a way of getting around problems with reading: it is a highly enriching experience in its own right, generating particular and unique responses amongst individuals and groups. Experiences that were individual are opened up, leading to reading becoming a rich, communal experience that addresses the most basic of our human needs.

We are delighted to celebrate World Read Aloud Day by becoming a WRADvocate Partner of World Read Aloud Day for 2012, joining a worldwide community of brilliant organisations advocating reading aloud for everyone.

We’re also celebrating through the launch of our latest Evening Read-In, the read-aloud-and-along shared reading event held on our social media networks which takes reading aloud to a worldwide scale, tomorrow evening.

Make sure you mark World Read Aloud Day by reading something aloud to someone you love and help spread the word about the importance of reading aloud.

This time around we’re travelling to South Africa, courtesy of current Communications Intern George Hawkins. In particular we’ll be looking at one aspect of its literary history: Afrikaans literature.

South Africa has an interesting literary history. Much of this is owed to the fractious history of a county which in the last couple of hundred years has been dominated by very different groups, has fully 11 national languages (with supposedly equal status) and has a long history of violent nationalism and antagonistic relations amongst its peoples.

Afrikaans is a young language (it was only standardised as a separate language in 1875!), and its literary culture is even younger. It was originally an offshoot of High Dutch, spoken in the 17th Century by the first white men to colonise South Africa. Later it evolved into an African language of its own, with identifiable grammatical differences from Dutch, developing linguistically away from its mother tongue, even as the people who spoke it developed their own separate identity as Afrikaners.

Afrikaner literature has always been heavily influenced by the ecclesiastical, reflecting the Afrikaner cultural affinity for the same. As a result it took some time for a tradition of Afrikaner literature to really grow and flourish, first it had to separate itself from Dutch, throw off the shackles of excessive religious influence and contend with the challenges of life in South Africa: many Afrikaners were country people, farmers and hunters, meaning it was often difficult to develop the kind of civil society that promotes a healthy literary culture. Eventually though, adversity fostered a thriving sense of identity and a cultural expression through books. Traumatic events such as the Second Boer War (in which the British Army, through incompetence rather than malice, caused the deaths of many thousands of Afrikaner women and children from disease in camps) helped the Afrikaner literary culture coalesce, and it has thrived since. As is often the case, books provided an outlet for collective grief, and ultimately art benefitted from tragedy.

One of the major literary movements in Afrikaans has been Die Sestigers (‘The Sixtiers’), a movement of Afrikaans-language writers who wrote, amongst other things, in protest against the status quo of South African society in those days. They protested against apartheid, the system of racial segregation, keeping all the races of South Africa separate, ideally in their own ‘homelands’ –with the ultimate aim of securing white hegemony. Apartheid was a predominantly the creation of Afrikaner politicians (though many Anglo-descended South Africans embraced it too), and standing up to an authoritarian government and intolerant culture was a brave choice for Afrikaner writers. Using novels, poems and plays, these Sestigers highlighted the contradictions of their society, and therefore helped change it for the better. Like their predecessors who used literature as a source of collective catharsis, that generation of Afrikaner authors harnessed the power of literature for good for societies and people.