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"The Psychoanalytic Puppeteer Losing His Mind" by George Condo

There is no shortage of advice for writers about how to get inspired or generate ideas. This advice can range from reading other writers to taking long baths, listening to music tor reading morning pages. One of the most useful ones, in my experience, is art and photography; either visiting a gallery or actually going out with a camera or sketchbook and creating your own art. Visual stimulation is a great way to get your imagination going. As regular readers will know, we frequently provide Photo Inspirations to hopefully inspire you all.

Now The Hayward Gallery is the one providing the inspiration. To coincide with Mental States, an exhibition by George Condo  being held at Gallery, organisers are inviting the public to write 300 word short stories inspired by Condo’s portraits. The submissions will be judged by both George Condo and Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff, with the best stories being published on the Hayward Gallery blog. The overall winner will also receive limited edition George Condo playing cards, a signed catalogue and other prizes.

Spanning three decades of Condo’s work, this exhibition looks like a great way to get inspire so try writing something a bit different and maybe win some prizes. Mental States is running until January 8th. The competition closes on December 18th, so there is plenty of time to take a walk around the exhibit with a notebook in hand.

For more information on the competition see The Hayward Gallery’s Facebook page.

Alex Thornber

Lionel Shriver's selected novel, Revolutionary Road.

Vintage Classics Day

Foyles Bookshop, Charing Cross Road, 7th May 2011, 10am-5pm

Vintage Classics is introducing the Orange Inheritance collection this week. This collection of classic novels, selected and introduced by six Orange Prize winners as the book they would pass on the next generation, will be published on Thursday 7th April. The intriguing list includes classic and acclaimed novels, spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, including: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (selected by Helen Dunmore), Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (selected by Lionel Shriver, 2005 Orange Prize winner), Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac (Rose Tremain, the winner in 2008) and more.

To celebrate the new collection, Lionel Shriver, Kate Mosse and Mark Haddon will be speaking about their ‘Inheritance Classics’ at the Vintage Classics Day at Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London on Saturday 7th May. The fantastic line-up of speakers includes Jake Arnott, Sadie Jones, Sebastian Peake (Mervyn Peake’s son), Rose  Tremain and Sebastian Faulks.

There are limited early bird tickets available for the Vintage Classics Day only until Tuesday 5th April. These tickets are priced at £12. After Tuesday tickets will be at full price (£18/£15 concs).

To find out more about the event and to book tickets, visit the event page here at www.foyles.co.uk. For more details on the collection, including a full list of the novels, please see the story in the Orange Newsroom or read the Guardian online article here.

We were quite excited to see the Guardian give the Litro & IGGY Young Person’s Short Story Award a shout-out in their Children’s Books section, as part of a feature on opportunities for young writers:

Becky Barnicoat, 15th March 2011, www.guardian.co.uk

It’s great to see a publication like the Guardian not only providing a space online to encourage young people to discuss reading and writing, but actively promoting awards and competitions that can give young writers unique opportunities to practice their skills and be rewarded and publicly recognised for their talent and efforts.

To find out more about the Litro & IGGY International Young Person’s Short Story Award and to learn how to enter, please click here or visit our Competitions section. The Guardian article can be read online at www.guardian.co.uk.

Calling young writers! It’s competition time…

The Litro Russian Issue, 99

We are very excited about this latest issue of Litro – we love stories that focus on different facets of often fascinating and diverse countries, whether they have been penned by a native or by a writer who has been inspired by the history and culture of a foreign land. Our Russian issue promises to continue our trend for great foreign-languaged themed issues. Here’s a taster of what’s to come, from the editorial…

 What do we think of when we think of Russia? Frozen steppes or Soviet tower blocks? Tolstoy’s aristocrats or Pushkin’s peasants? Tsarism or Stalinism? Who is the truest Russian: the heroic drunk of Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow Stations or Andrey Kurkov’s mild-mannered obituarist from Death and the Penguin?

 Common images that spring to mind are billionaire oligarchs and gas princesses; dour black marketeers, mail-order brides and vodka-drinking men called Ivan. But Russia is far more than the sum of its clichés, and the variety of stories and subjects in this special issue of Litro goes to prove there’s plenty to explore in this fascinating place.

 In this issue of Litro  you’ll meet stray dogs and Arctic fishermen, heartbroken ex-prisoners and fast-talking murderers. Old and new Russia rub shoulders and sometimes clash: Louise Phillips’s Ipatiev House tells the history of the country through the life of one man, while in Max405 Richard House gives us international love in cyberspace. Oppression and poverty are recurring themes, but so too are hope and survival: such a vast country with such a chequered past is bound to provoke radically diverse responses in authors.

 Our two Russian writers, Polina Klyukina and Olga Slavnikova, showcase the variety of modern Russian literature: Klyukina’s Free explores the fate of released convicts, while Slavnikova, winner of the Russian Booker Prize, gives us Chanel No. 5, the tragicomic tale of a post-Soviet lab-worker longing for Western luxuries: a Litro exclusive appearing here for the first time in English.

 Once upon a time you needed a visa, a passport and a damned good reason to draw back the Iron Curtain and visit this extraordinary nation: today, all you have to do is turn the page.

 Спрездом в россию!*