Swindon Literature Festival Finale

A celebration with words, music, movement, and circus skills!

With stories, songs, dance, circus theatre, wordplay, music, performers, and pleasure, this promises to be a fitting Finale for the 30th Swindon Festival of Literature.
This year’s Finale line up will include the following:

Steve Rooney whose friendly face masks an inner sense of profound irony from whence he delivers astute observations from the hard shoulder of life’s motorway. He has performed to baying crowds at Latitude and to seven people on the outskirts of Derby. Now he has made it to Swindon!

 

 

 

 

 

The Rhythm & Roots Collective, aka Asafo Gyata, Bafana Matea, Ndabe Zitha, and Michael Fergie, will take us on a journey with words, movement, and rhythm. They will combine the power of body, voice, mind, and drum to put on a show that is both subtle and dynamic, to raise outlook and celebrate life. Asafo is an African/Caribbean musician, poet, and martial arts teacher; Bafana is a dancer and choreographer from South Africa via New York; Ndabe is a musician and storyteller from Zimbabwe; and Michael is a percussionist, musician, and creator of the Suitcase Soundsystem, in action tonight!
  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Professor Jim Malone, with a background in Medical Physics and interests in the arts and set dancing, is a long-time Festival supporter, who travels annually from Dublin to Swindon to celebrate Literature, ideas, and life, with us. Tonight, he presents his newly-published book, Tales from the Ivory Tower, which includes accounts of a terrifying car journey through the Kuwaiti night desert and helping a bishop at risk of unfair prosecution. It offers an elegiac view of things Ireland needs but may not quite deserve. 

Olivia Murphy sings! She loves singing, at the Dawn Chorus outdoors or at the Finale indoors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sara-Jane Arbury is a performer and poet who has worked in radio, television, and Swindon. She has been told that she has an eye for the unusual. What the other one is looking at, she has no idea!

 

 

 

Jacob Hi-Ho and Darine Flanagan, two circus artistes, will present a physically fantastic final flourish to help bring the curtain down in appropriately fabulous fashion on Swindon’s 30th Festival of Literature.