Why read fiction? That was the central question at the heart of a fascinating day at the newly refurbished Bluecoat last weekend where writers Kate Mosse, Philippa Gregory, Lionel Shriver, Clare Allen and Bel Mooney were joined by Shami Chakrabarti to talk about the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
As well as the opportunity to meet some established writers it was an opportunity to find out how lives had been touched by literature.
Shami Chakbrabarti, the familiar public face of Liberty revealed a much warmer, friendlier and human side at the event.
As one of the judges of this year's Orange Prize she revealed what a privilege it had been to read new writers. It reminded her of the importance of fiction and confessed that her childhood reading of To Kill A Mockingbird was one of the motivations for becoming a human rights campaigner.
Bel Mooney told of how a regular drive through London took her past a row of houses where Eastern European workers queued on a daily basis to find work. After reading Rose Tremain's new book, The Road Home, about Lev seeking work in Britain she will look at these men in a different light.
At a recent session of my MA writing course at MMU writer Sherry Ashworth said good writing wasn't about imagination but empathy.
And before I started working as a prison writer in residence I was made aware of a project in the States called Changing Lives Through Literature where petty criminals were given the choice between a three month custodial sentence or an intensive three-month reading course of carefully selected texts testing attitudes to violence, racial tensions and other pertinent issues.The results are staggering. The reoffending rates of participants on this programme is 20% compared with 45% of those who seek custodial sentences. So can literature change lives? In a nutshell, yes it can and it does!
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