Travels Through the Looking Glass

The final performance of Travels Through The Looking Glass took place on Friday 9th May, playing to a packed house both inside and outside Dinefwr House, in deepest Carmarthenshire. The outstanding performances from the cast began within the plush surroundings of this beautifully-restored, and very recent National Trust acquisition, before, led by the Frog Footman, we were beckoned outside where the play continued. Rousing, prolonged applause greeted the actors at the end of the adaptation. Dressed in fawn-coloured calico, the costumes shaped from the original Peake illustrations, the actors then brought us all back inside again for the final poetic flourish. The clapping took some time to die down.

The Forbidden City

John Keay, writing in the current Times Literary Supplement reviews among other recently published books on China, Geremie R.Barme's The Forbidden City and writes, 'Nothing better conveys the Forbidden City's reputation as both palace and prison than Barme's revelation that the fictional Gormenghast of the Titus Groan trilogy owed its hide-bound rituals, if not its architecture, to Mervyn Peake's upbringing in nearby Tianjin in the early years of the twentieth century. Peake's creation was another world within a world, another warren of chambers and courtyards in which the fair and foul cohabited promiscuously. It too was built in alignment with the four points of the compass and the passage of a reluctant sun. And like the infant Groan, seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast, the young Puyi - China's "Last Emperor" as per the Bertolucci film - must have been "suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes a labyrinth of stone".

Locus Award Nomination

The well-known American fantasy and science fiction magazine, Locus, published in Oakland, California, but popular around the world, has just shortlisted Mervyn Peake: The Man & His Art for an art-book award.

The Titus Books in Hungarian

The publishing house Pecsi Direkt Kft. of Pecs, Hungary will be bringing out all three titles in Hungarian within the next 18 months, thus making the work available in this exotic language.

Mervyn Peake and Weird Tales magazine

It's great to see Mervyn Peake among the names nominated by readers of the magazine as "the weirdest of the weird: the most influentially strange authors, artists, film-makers, songwriters, and tale-spinners of all kinds to work their magic on the world in the 85 years since 1923 when Weird Tales was born". Among many others on the list are: Franz Kafka, J G Ballard, Neil Gaiman, Tim Burton, Roald Dahl, Salvador Dali, Michael Moorcock and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The full list can be seen here.

Quay Arts Centre, Isle of Wight, 19th September

On Friday 19th September at 8.00 pm I'll be speaking at the Quay Arts Centre, Sea Street, Newport, Isle of Wight PO30 5BD. This is the island's leading art gallery and live arts venue.

For further information call 01983 822490

Bindman Lectures, Dove Cottage, 30th August

On Saturday 30th August at 3.00 pm I will be speaking in The Reading Room, Jerwood Centre, Dove Cottage, Cumbria as part of the annual Bindman Lectures. For further information contact www.wordsworth.org.uk or call 01539 463527

The New York Univeristy, Paris, 4th July

On the occasion of the 20th Paris Writers’ Workshop, I will speak at the New York University in Paris. Beginning at 7.00 pm, I’ll discuss my father's life and work, and also show clips from various television films. For further information see www.pariswritersworkshop.org

Nonsense Verse in New York

The New Amsterdam Choir, a New York ensemble, will be singing music especially composed by Richard Rodney Bennett for a recital in May of Mervyn Peake's nonsense verse. Describing A Book of Nonsense as the funniest verse she'd ever read the conductor will be presenting this debut evening at a New York concert hall.

The Collected Poems of Mervyn Peake - publication date, June 2008

The publication in June of the long awaited Collected Poems of Mervyn Peake from Carcanet Press, will be one of the most exciting and eagerly anticipated events of recent times, especially as the edition will include over 40 previously unseen drawings. With as disparate a range of subjects as love and war, grief loneliness and heartbreak, humour will not be missing from the wide artistic canon which made up Mervyn Peake's output. The collection will lay before the reader emotions covering the broadest span of human experience, exposing both observation and philosophy, sensitivity and intuition with a clarity inherent in the work of this poet and writer, illustrator, artist and thinker.

The Titus Trilogy on CD

Edmund Dehn, the accomplished actor who took on and succeeded magnificently, in the Herculean task of reading the whole trilogy on audiotape, will again be recording the novels, this time on CD. Titus Groan will be released towards the end of 2008 with the other titles available at three month intervals thereafter.

The Mervyn Peake Awards

The idea of an annual award to celebrate the work of Mervyn Peake, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, was given the go-ahead in 2001 by the then chief executive of the Parkinson's Disease Society. Despite the severe constrictions limiting his own work, my father continued working on commissions so the idea was to encourage others to emulate his bravery. There are three categories; art, photography, and poetry, with the winner in each section recognised with a prize, an exhibition, and press write-ups. The winner in the 2007 art section was Charlotte Johnson-Wahl, Boris Johnson's mother, who produced an evocative and highly original painting of a busy London street scene.