If you would like to book A.L.Kennedy for a reading, Q&A session, panel discussion, comedy gig, performance of WORDS with A.L.Kennedy, or some other event, please consult the information following.
If you want more info on performances – consult the Film, Drama and Comedy section.
AGENT –
If you would like to contact A.L.Kennedy, inquiries and requests will be forwarded through her agent whose details are below
Antony Harwood c/o
Antony Harwood Ltd
103 Walton Street
Oxford
OX2 6EB
Phone: 01865 559615
Fax: 01865 554173
Email: ant@antonyharwood.com or james@antonyharwood.com
Web: www.antonyharwood.com
UK PUBLISHERS –
Who may be able to help you with info and publicity material
PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE (For Jonathan Cape and Vintage books)
EVENTS –
and finally… if you are arranging an event please read and inwardly digest the following items of friendly but insistent advice. these are not here to alarm you, merely as a guide. all the calamities and misfortunes mentioned have happened, often more than once…
SO…
IF YOU ARE PLANNING AN EVENT, PLEASE DO…
- Advertise the event beforehand, unless you have a guaranteed, existing audience – like a whole wing of a very secure prison or a ward of coma patients.
- Provide a working microphone, if necessary. That’s really working – not you thought it was working last time you checked, which was a month ago, or the man in the pub that you bought it from said it was working. And have a spare, because whatever we start using may well go wrong.
- Remember to perform your sound check before the audience is admitted and definitely not once everyone is there, including me and we’ve all been hanging about for twenty minutes.
- Provide water for the author to drink during performance/workshop. Non-fizzy is best – we wouldn’t want hiccoughs breaking out.
- Provide any other equipment which may be requested for a workshop – like flip charts, video players, giant fur-lined Faberge egg, etc.
- Provide a space which allows audience/participants and author to be warm, comfortable, safe and undisturbed, which has decent sight-lines and sufficient chairs, and which isn’t prone to power cuts, being blown away, or attacked by infestations of any kind. And, just another reminder on this one – have heating and turn it on.
- Agree, and abide by your agreement to provide a suitable payment. If you are a charity or small organisation, you may not have to pay anything, but do arrange this beforehand. Or the author will work powerful black magic against you.
- Provide clean, quiet accommodation, if the author is staying overnight. With heating and hot water – not an abandoned building, or tent, or dodgy room over a dodgier pub unless you’ve cleared this beforehand.
- Agree, and abide by, what the author will be expected to do. Last minute changes can often be accommodated, but don’t double the length of the session and decide you want to mix a reading with comedy and spoon-playing and a school’s session without a small amount of prior consultation.
IF YOU ARE PLANNING AN EVENT, PLEASE DON’T…
- Forget to tell anyone about the event.
- Dump the author in a cold, foul-smelling B&B, noisy pub, condemned hotel or, in fact dump the author into any accommodation that you haven’t checked out yourself and wouldn’t spend a night in yourself…. be honest… that’s yourself, not yourself if you were in the SAS and had just got back from jungle manoeuvres, or yourself if you had previously been living in a cave with self-confessed cannibals…
- Pay the author in a foreign currency, or pretty objects unless this has been arranged beforehand. You wouldn’t pay your electrician in beads and candles, why would you pay an author like that?
- Fail to pay the author and do a runner.
- Do the sound check while the audience are in their seats.
- Start more than ten minutes late, unless you really can’t help it.
- Set up the event in a noisy, through-way to some other location, or a café where passive-aggressive cutlery counting is every staff members favourite pastime and the coffee machine is going to interrupt every three minutes.
- Fail to pick up the author from the airport/station, if you have arranged to.
- Fail to take the author back to the airport/station, if you have arranged to.
- Dump the author at a wind-swept bus shelter in the middle of nowhere and a sleet storm.
- Tell the author train times which do not exist – the author may not always have time to double-check your errors.
- Forget that the author needs to eat and take in beverages.
- Forget that the author needs to sleep. For significant periods, maybe even all night.
- Trap the author for hours at random locations for no reason, drag her on cultural tours that would bore a horse to death, or otherwise painfully dominate her time when she isn’t actually working for you.
- Expect the author to get drunk with you all night, get stoned with you all night, or do anything else with you all night – you have paid for the event, not the author. If you are charming and delightful company you probably will end up chatting all night, should you wish to – but do check with someone else about that whole charming and delightful thing…
- Expect the author to wake at dawn, spend all day travelling by the cheapest, most ludicrous route, without nourishment and then give a splendid performance. She will try to, but only because she thinks the audience deserves a break. You deserve bad stuff that someone who isn’t a pacifist may one day do to you.
- Make the author fly – the author will go almost anywhere by strange routes over periods of days, but will not fly – and travel over a period of days shouldn’t rely entirely on sleeper cars and perpetual motion.
- If the author is moments away from performing a show which she has had to memorise and which will demand concentration, try not to chat aimlessly to her in the wings – for a start, she won’t be listening…