Nairn Book & Arts Festival

With a daily talk show on BBC Radio Scotland since l997, nominated for the Celtic Media Festival Award as Best Radio Presenter 2010, Fred MacAulay still manages to do enough stand-up to maintain his profile as one of Scotland’s best-loved comedians.  This year he took his stand-up show to Los Angeles and had a wonderful time!  ‘MacAulay had the audience in stitches’  Hollywood Reporter.

He is a regular performer at the Edinburgh Fringe and at comedy festivals worldwide as well as a regular guest on comedy quiz programs like They Think It’s All Over, Just A Minute, QI, I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue, Mock the Week, The News Quiz and Have I Got News For You.

Firmly disproving the myth that accountants are a humourless bunch, this former bean counter has a calculated wit – always intelligent, but never too taxing.  Irrespective of whether an audience is divided between young and old, alternative or mainstream, the broad appeal of Fred MacAulay always adds up to a hilarious night out.

Allan MacDonald, a highly qualified and experienced artist dedicates most of his time to painting the Northern Landscape: “this corner of God’s earth is extraordinarily beautiful and a ceaseless source for memorable images”

Off the Peg is the community art event in Nairn High Street.  Unframed paintings pegged inside shop windows for all to see and buy.  10% of sales will be given to the Children’s Art Club. 

The exhibition is supported by Nairn Art Society whose Summer exhibition takes place at the Court House from 2nd August.

Event Information (DOC)

Katie Hickman is the author of six previous books, including two bestselling history books, Courtesans and Daughters of Britannia, which was adapted as a highly successful 20-part series for BBC Radio 4.  She was born into a diplomatic family and spent the first 25 years of her life living in Europe, the Far East and South America. Her later travels lead to two acclaimed travel books, including Travels with a Circus, about her experiences travelling with a Mexican circus. She will be talking about the inspiration behind her stunning new historical novel, The Pindar Diamond, giving some readings from it and answering questions about her life and writing.

Barry Pilton moans entertainingly about the dilemmas of writing a rural comedy.  What is one to do when the source material is too bizarre, the events too far-fetched , and the personalities too eccentric for words?  Barry explains how the truth must be creatively mangled lest the author be thought mad.  A travel writer, radio and tv script writer (his credits include Not the Nine O’Clock News, Week Ending and Spitting Image) he has written some hilarious novels, including his most recent, Land of my Neighbours – ‘a beguiling, tragic-comic tale of conservation, covetousness and croquet’.

The Nairn Camera Club will exhibit entries for their competition, which has three categories: Under 12 (or attending Primary) 12 – 18 and Over 18’s.  The competition which is free to enter and open to all allows a choice of subject and either colour or black and white for the photographs.

Download Competition Poster
Download Entry Form

Tim Honnor, who spoke last year on “Jutland”, is back again with a fascinating story about the 1941 capture of a German U Boat, and its subsequent transfer into the Royal Navy.  Tim, who served in submarines for nearly twenty years, found out much of this story in the 1970s whilst at Barrow-in Furness, waiting for a new nuclear submarine to be built.

A motley assortment of odds and ends: a conglomeration, a gallimaufry, a hotchpotch, a jumble, a medley, a melange, a mingle-mangle, a miscellany, a mixed bag, a patchwork, a potpourri, a ragbag of readings and songs, some serious, many humorous and some even downright flippant, read by the usual suspects Alison Edgar, John Fyfe, Viv Hardie, Ronald Lyall, Jan Mathieson and Roddy Ross.  Come early for a cup of coffee before they start.