Sevenoaks Bookshop is working in partnership with Dialogue Books and Fane to provide the books for their monthly events.
Dialogue Books is the home to a variety of stories from illuminating voices often excluded from the mainstream. Dialogue Books shines a spotlight on stories for, about and by readers from the LGBTQI+, disability, working class and BAME communities. The imprint has a clear focus of distinctive, cross-genre titles that spark a conversation across fiction, non-fiction, commercial and literary publishing.
Fane is an online production company, working with inspiring voices from the world of literature, podcasts, screen and stage.
A Night in with Niven Govinden – 17 April 2021, 6.30pm
Book and ticket includes a copy of A Diary of a Film (RRP £14.99), there is also a ticket only option.
An auteur, together with his lead actors, is at a prestigious European festival to premiere his latest film. Alone one morning at a backstreet café, he strikes up a conversation with a local woman who takes him on a walk to uncover the city’s secrets, historic and personal. As the walk unwinds, a story of love and tragedy emerges, and he begins to see the chance meeting as fate. He is entranced, wholly clear in his mind: her story must surely form the basis for his next film.
Join Niven Govinden to celebrate the publication of his new book, A Diary of a Film: a novel about cinema, flâneurs, and queer love; it is about the sometimes troubled, sometimes ecstatic creative process, and the toll it takes on its makers. In conversation for this event, Niven will consider how his writing gets to the heart of what it is to live an artistic life caught in the never-present of the piece just made and the piece as yet uncreated. He’ll touch on art making, obsession and responsibility, how art ravages and redeems, and the imperative to create something substantial in a world that moves too quickly to capture beauty to one’s satisfaction.
From the comfort of your home, let Niven whisk you away to the gourmet surroundings of a Northern Italian film festival for an evening that feels like an elegy to a just-gone era.
For more information and to book a ticket: https://www.fane.co.uk/niven-govinden
A Night in with Kit Fan – 13 May 2021, 6.30pm
Book and ticket includes a copy of Diamond Hil (RRP £14.99), there is also a ticket only option.
Join poet and author Kit Fan for a wide-reaching conversation about religion, colonialism, and displacement to celebrate the publication of his hard-hitting and exhilarating debut novel. Set in the last shanty town of Hong Kong before the fraught 1997 handover from Britain to China, Diamond Hill follows the return of a recovering heroin addict, Buddha, as he tries to salvage what’s left from a place he hoped to forget.
Diamond Hill was once the ‘Hollywood of the Orient’, but is now an eyesore in the middle of a glitzy financial hub. Buddhist nuns, drug gangs, property developers, the government and foreign powers are all vying for power, each wanting to stake their claim on the land. Buddha finds himself crossing swords with the Iron Nun, fighting for her nunnery; a disturbed novice, Quartz, who is fleeing her past; a faded film actress called Audrey Hepburn; and Boss, a teenage gang leader with a big mouth and even bigger plans, plotting to escape what she calls ‘the death of Hong Kong’.
Spend an evening with Kit, as he explores the price of forgetting and how the present is ultimately always entangled in the past. This is a story of loss and of being lost – a requiem for a disappearing city.
For more information and to book a ticket: https://www.fane.co.uk/kit-fan
A Night in with Clint Smith – 23rd June 2021
Coming soon!