London Lit Plus has now run for two years, and if you need a reminder of what happened, here’s everything from 2007 and 2008.

It’s been great, and we’re very grateful to everyone who’s run events, helped out, and come along. But we also want to see LL+ grow, and in the face of increasing funding issues for many literary groups and the growth of all kinds of competition, we feel it’s time for LL+ to take on a new lease of life. It deserves more time and more effort that we can commit to it, but we’re sure there are others out there who can step up.

So, we’re looking for someone else to take on the festival. We’ll be pleased to continue to support it, and a successor will have full use of the name, this domain, and the software and support that comes with it.

So if you believe in live literature, and want to see the spirit of LL+ - of independence, openness, and diversity of literary styles and access - continue, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.

As a reminder of what’s gone before, here’s some of the press we’ve received:

• Guardian Unlimited Arts: “London’s book festival acquires a fringe.”
• The Guardian Books Blog: “A London literary festival with great, but familiar names does an injustice to the richness of the city’s literary life.” (article by James Bridle).
• Londonist: “Get us.”
• Fridaycities: “Just in terms of live events, in the space of a few days, you can see slam poetry in Hackney, take in a selection of short stories by unknown authors at a local bookshop, hear the latest bestseller read by the author, sit in on one of the many writer’s groups that meet each week, or take in one of the walks around literary sites that happen from Earl’s Court to Whitechapel, and beyond.”
• Flavorpill LDN: “For many, the term “literary festival” conjures images of tweed-suited gentlemen and glasses-sporting women discoursing on Shakespearean minutiae while queuing up to score a signature from an obscure poet. Not so with London Lit Plus, a so-called “open” festival in which anyone can host an event … includes quirky happenings … on the highly varied agenda.”
• Le Cool: “there’s something much more exciting going, more democratic and more egalitarian than the exclusive world of A-list writers, and it’s really where most of the new literary talent might be hiding.”
• SYP: “An effort by several avant garde literary bods to get London to wake up to just how much out there isn’t part of the Nobel laureates and dignitaries that will grace the Festival.”
• Urban Junkies: “So whereas you’ll find Roger McGough and Iain Sinclair on the Southbank, LL+ offers up the slightly more subversive…”
• The Bookseller: “A coalition of online literary magazines 3:AM Magazine, Scarecrow and booktwo.org and independent publisher Social Disease Publishing is launching an alternative London literature festival, to run alongside the South Bank’s inaugural London Literary Festival.”
• Dazed & Confused: “The fact that LL+ is coinciding (or clashing) with the Southbank’s literary festival means that those who are seeking the best of London’s more unconventional lit events are provided with an obvious alternative - intimate atmospheres and exceptional young writers for less money.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 5:00 pm in News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.