‘Ours is a useful trade, a worthy calling. With all its lightness and frivolity, it has one serious purpose, one aim, one speciality, and it is constant to it: the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.’ So wrote Mark Twain over 100 years ago, but his celebration of the satirist’s craft is arguably even more relevant today in a dangerous age of ‘post-truth’ and ‘post-integrity.’
Star & Crescent and the University of Portsmouth’s Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries present satirists working across fiction, memoir, journalism, graphic art and music whose targets range from the local to the international, from politics to sexual morality, from artistic pretensions to literary conventions, from the things we take for granted to the things we don’t think about enough.
Brace yourselves for a lively, funny, frivolous yet serious and combative evening.
Where? Eldon Building, University of Portsmouth.
When? 7.30pm on March 21st 2017
Free entry
Check out our Facebook event here.
Our performers:
Charlotte Comley is a writer, creative writing tutor and professional storyteller.
Olly Gruner is a writer, musician and lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of Portsmouth. His research focuses on the history and legacy of the 1960s and he is the author of Screening the Sixties: Hollywood Cinema and the Politics of Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). In 2015, he organised a series of satirical events, This Is the Week That Is: A Celebration of Political Satire at Portsmouth University.
Justin MacCormack is a horror author, specialising in the abstract and bizarre. His popular anthology, Hush! A Horror Anthology is available now, and his comedy erotica novella The Castle of Count Shagula is due out soon (it is also horrifying, but for very different reasons).
Van Norris is an expert on satirical film and the author of British Television Animation 1997-2010. He also creates visual satire under the pseudonym Jack Caramac.
Louis Netter is a trained illustrator, animator and designer with over 10 years of experience teaching in higher education. His current work is in experimental graphic novels, from the literary to the controversial. Artwork is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, New York Historical Society and many University libraries across the USA. www.louisnetter.com.
William Sutton is a novelist, musician and Latin teacher. He has written for The Times, appeared at the Edinburgh Festival and Highdown Prison, acted in the longest play in the world, and played cricket for Brazil. His historical Lawless mysteries (Titan Books) unearth the dirtier side of Victorian London’s cobblestones (July 2016). He writes for Star & Crescent and Southsea Lifestyle and redistributes his teaching income round Southsea via the medium of cake.
Tom Sykes is an author, journalist and Portsmouth University lecturer whose work has appeared in Private Eye, New Statesman, The Scotsman and Star & Crescent. He is one of the founding editors of Star & Crescent and his latest book is Ivory Coast: The Bradt Guide.
(Graphic courtesy of Jack Caramac)
