Thursday 29 July 2010

Books, ghouls and dinner with Felicity Collins

Great evening last night at the Edithburgh Hotel, hearing author Felicity Collins speak about her extraordinary life, and about the process of authoring.

The night was introduced by Helen Stockings who gave kudos to the main local organizer Shirley Thompson, librarian of the Yorketown Community Library. Everyone present was delighted by her imaginative setting up of the venue. Quite spooky ... ghosts and spiderwebs around the room, and gargoyles on some tables, ours anyway! Not sure about the others. Because, of course, the second book in her Oracles series for young and young-adult readers, has lots of weird and scary adventures of the Penny family who were met with in Book One, Labyrinthus.
Michaela took the pic of Will with Felicity who tactfully scrooched down to make me look the taller.

This wasn't the formal book launch which isn't until Sunday in Adelaide, but it was a sort of pre-launch. The new book, which was available seen-for-the-first-time, is called enigmatically The Gargoyle Prison and the World of Eahtotha. You can read more about it at the publishers' site Bliss Out Books

My companion for the evening was another writer, locally well-known Gwenda Quinn, past winner of the Ericksen Award for her stories and verse. It was a privilege for me to be able to introduce these two scribes who seemed to hit it off right away. And I also got  to meet Felicity's clever publicist Michaela Andreyev, plus other book-appreciating folk like Lesley May, the Bilney and Menz family representatives, plus 50 more. I'm new in the district - this is only my eighth year. Everybody else seemed to know everybody else already.

 Right: Gwenda Quinn (foreground), with Peter and Meg Bilney

No comments:

Post a Comment