Xiaolu Guo (image: Hastings Book Festival).

Local authors in early September appetiser for Hastings Book Festival

The Hastings Book Festival is still a few weeks away, but dedicated fans can enjoy an early starter course following the announcement of a special additional event featuring Xiaolu Guo and Catherine Johnson at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery on Thursday 5 September. Chris Connelley reveals all.

This free session takes the form of the local book launch for My Battle of Hastings: Chronicle of a Year by the Sea, the well-received new memoir by acclaimed author and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, who rented a flat on the seafront and spent a year living in, and finding out about, the town.

Catherine Johnson (image: Hastings Book Festival).

She will be sharing her experiences in conversation with another Hastings-based writer, Catherine Johnson, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature whose award-winning titles include Landlocked and Sawbones.

Guo was born in China, and lived in Berlin and London before moving to the south coast. Her accounts of those previous journeys are documented in Once upon a Time in the East and its sequel, Radical: A Life of My Own.

Her new book takes up her story from the winter of 2021, when she rented a rundown seafront apartment in Hastings to pursue her craft, alone, without the distractions of family and everyday domesticity. Months later, as Russia invaded Ukraine, she immersed herself in the English landscape and its past, including the defining conflict between Normans and Saxons.

The Financial Times described the work as “illuminating”, noting “she walks the beaches and hills, pondering over the stories behind monuments and statues, imbibing local news and customs against the backdrop of the town’s faded grandeur and endless rubbish, the winter storms and acute summer heatwave presaging climate change”.

The event is being promoted in partnership with the Hastings Bookshop, whose owner, Charlie Crabb, runs an ambitious author readings and talks programme from his Trinity Street store. The original plan was to run this session there too, but interest was so great that it was decided to move to a larger venue to accommodate the expected high demand and to use it as an informal pre-launch for the main Book Festival, which gets under way on Friday 13 September.

Hastings Book festival director Wayne Herbert added, “We are delighted to work with the Hastings Bookshop on this appetiser for our upcoming 2024 festival and are excited about this conversation between two talented writers who have moved to the town and are now living locally as part of our growing and increasingly diverse literary scene”.

Hastings Museum

The Hastings Museum and Art Gallery can be found on Bohemia Road, just a short distance from Hastings town centre. It is an Arts Council England funded National Portfolio Organisation busy building a reputation as a cultural hotspot with a penchant for innovative programming and an active commitment to showcasing and celebrating diversity.

It is also the location for the annual Sanctuary Festival and has just finished hosting the well-received Black Joy! exhibition curated by Lorna Hamilton-Brown MBE.

In Conversation with Xiaolu Guo and Catherine Johnson Thursday 5 September, 6pm, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, John’s Place, Bohemia Road, Hastings TN34 1ET. The event is free but ticketed. Book here. 

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