Tales from the City:
Awards Ceremony
and Anthology Launch
with Roy Nevitt
Saturday 6 April, 10am - 10.30am
Central Milton Keynes Library,
555 Silbury Boulevard, Milton Keynes MK9 3HL
Tickets: £Free
Join us as we announce the winners of our Writing Competition - Tales from the City - and launch the fourth issue of our MinK anthologies of the best local writing. Roy Nevitt, the 'cultural godfather' of Milton Keynes, will be on hand to award the prizes and introduce readings by the winning writers.
Milton Keynes has evolved from a cluster of Buckinghamshire villages and towns to a whole new city. This year, Lit Fest adopted Tales from the City as the theme for a flash fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry competition.
As the cliché runs, every city has a thousand stories – or, more accurately in our city's case, a quarter of a million individual stories. Entrants were encouraged to interpret the theme however they wished. There might be tales of arrival, of birth, of transformation, of the emotional rollercoaster of human existence. Or stories of a city itself: you cannot have a history without the story that the word literally and metaphorically contains. And buildings, streets and landscapes have histories just as people – or animals or trees and plants – do.
To find out how the finest writers of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire responded to our theme, come along to hear the winning stories - and to buy the anthology.
About Roy Nevitt
Roy Nevitt moved to Stony Stratford in 1967, initially to work as a lecturer in drama at North Bucks College of Education. After three years in the USA and eighteen months in East London, he returned to MK as Director of Drama at Stantonbury Campus where, with his late wife Maggie, he began to build up community drama in the new city.
In 1984, with community worker Roger Kitchen, he set up Living Archive, expressly designed to capture people's personal stories of their lives, particularly those in, or moving to MK, so they would not be lost. One of the earliest pioneers of the community theatre movement, his large-scale community musical documentary plays were based on local stories from Wolverton and New Bradwell: All Change, Your Loving Brother Albert, Days of Pride, Sheltered Lives, Nellie and The Jovial Priest. They remain extraordinarily successful and have greatly helped the infant city gain a sense of ‘self’. He also wrote the community drama The Burston School Strike.
Along the way Roy has been a Member of the Arts Council of Great Britain Drama panel and Chairman of their Drama Projects Committee; Chairman of East Midlands Arts Drama Panel, Member of South Arts Drama Panel; Co-initiator of MK Arts Association, forerunner of Arts Gateway MK; Chairman of MK Theatre and Gallery Company; and awarded an Honorary Degree of Master of the Open University.