News: Catch Matt performing in the Literary Death Match at London’s Stoke Newington Literary Festival, June 2nd!
I’ll be facing off against some of Britain’s best writers and comedians in the 26th Literary Death Match at London’s hipsterest literary festival this June.
If you’ve not yet had the pleasure of sampling Outlaws Inc., or enjoyed it but suspect what it might be missing is a live, onstage setting in which its woefully under-prepared author reads bits of it out on stage for a panel of comedy judges, vying with four other authors for a place in the final of some tipsy, nerd-friendly version of a gladiatorial contest, then Stoke Newington Literary Festival on June 2nd 2012 is the place to be.
The 26th Literary Death Match sees me lining up against ace novelist Anna Raverat, top comedian Andy Zaltzman, and acclaimed author of 50 Ways To Find A Lover Lucy Ann Holmes. (My performance will be the only non-fiction reading on the bill, so not sure how that’ll go down.) The performances will be analysed, lampooned and otherwise picked apart for the entertainment of the baying mob, by a panel of all-star judges. After each pair of readings, in which authors face off, the judges select their favorite to advance to the finals based on “literary merit, performance and intangibles” and give their own often hilarious commentary on each story.
Literary Death Match is everywhere at the moment. Billed as a “competitive, humour-centric reading series… part way between Def Poetry Jam and American Idol without the nastiness”, it brings together writers from different disciplines with comedians and critics, in a night of live literary performance.
Literary Death Matches are now a regular fixture from LA to Berlin. It sounds like a circus, admit the organizers, but “That’s half the point. Literary Death Match is passionate about inspecting new and innovative ways to present text off the page, and the most fascinating part is how seriously attentive the audience is during each reading.”
My performance/potential mistimed Pinot Grigio car crash begins at 8pm in the Library Gallery on Stoke Newington Church Street. Tickets are just a fiver each – you can book them from Ticketweb here – and you can bet there’ll be lots of booze and good vibes.
If you’re there, do come and say hello. I’ll be the chap who looks like a smaller, slightly drunker – perhaps older somehow – version of my avatar, and reading from a book with my name on it, but which I appear never to have seen before in my life.If you want to contact me, I’m on Twitter as @MattPotter (see what I did there), and you can email me at matt [at] mattpotterbooks [dot] com. I sign books for warm wine, and for crisps I’ll draw pictures too
You can follow Literary Death Match on Twitter at @LitDeathMatch, and Stoke Newington Literary Festival at @StokeyLitFest too. The full programme of Stoke Newington Literary Festival is here. And it’s a corker.