Salon is a series of six literary evenings with guest speakers at Chalkwell Hall, Southend on Sea.  They take place on the first Wednesday of every month (except August) over the summer of 2010. 

Tickets are on sale from Thursday 8th July until Wednesday 1st September

The next Salon event will be held on:

September 1st – Guest speaker: Robert MacFarlane, British travel writer and literary critic.  Macfarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, was published in 2003 and won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.  His second book, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature, was published in March 2007.  The Wild Places was published in September 2007. In it he embarks on a series of journeys in search of the wildness that remains in Britain and Ireland.  The book explores wildness both geographically and intellectually, testing different ideas of the wild against different landscapes, and describes Macfarlane's explorations of forests, moors, salt marshes, mudflats, islands, sea-caves and city fringes.  A condensed version of the book was broadcast as Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 in September 2007. In November 2007, the book won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, and in June 2008 it won the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book Of The Year Award.

Background to Salon

Salon is a collaboration between celebrated writer and artist Rachel Lichtenstein and the arts organisation, Metal. These nights have been inspired by the informal gatherings once held at Rachel’s grandparent’s house, on the nearby Chalkwell Hall estate, when they would invite the poets, writers and artists of the pre-war Jewish East End to talk debate and share ideas in their tiny front room.

We will be packing the drawing room of the former manor house that now houses Metal, to hear some outstanding authors and creative thinkers talk about their work.