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Recreation

Sarah Hall

Hailing from Cumbria, Hall’s first novel Haweswater was published in 2002 and won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her second novel The electric Michelangelo was short-listed for the 2004 Man Booker prize.

Hall started her creative life as a poet and this is clearly signposted in her first two novels through her use of language and the dreamy, ethereal quality they exhibit.  Her latest novel, The Carhullan army, is a radical departure which she herself describes as being “very plot driven, full of action, not the kind of thing I usually write.”

Set in an oil depleted future the United Kingdom is controlled by “the Authority” and life has been reduced to a brutal subsidence based existence.  It won the John Llewellyn-Rhys memorial Prize for 2007 and has been compared to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Orwell’s 1984.

Sarah Hall is involved in four festival sessions, a staple festival favourite “Books left on buses”,  history and the novel, an opening night reading and finally an individual hour long audience.

• Information about Sarah Hall from the Festival website
• Search the library catalogue for books by Sarah Hall