ENGLAND ON FIRE
THURSDAY, 20 OCTOBER 2022
As the nights draw in and the days grow stranger, join us on a visual journey through Albion's psychic landscape, guided by Stephen Ellcock and Howard Cunnell
6.30pm-8.30pm Bar Nothing
Curator Stephen Ellcock's England on Fire "is a book about English art like no other." Epiphanic and insightful, wild and rebellious, it revels in the euphoria of possibility. He will be in conversation with Howard Cunnell, whose novel The Painter's Friend is an "intimate, dark, wry and beautiful" exploration of art, protest and belonging.
8.30pm-late
All-English Psych DJ set from More Ritual and Philly Kev
Entry is free but please RSVP to info@themargatebookshop.com to guarantee a space.
Image detail from Dan Hillier’s The Fount (2021).
Stephen Ellcock is a curator, image-scavenger and art-fugitive whose virtual galleries on Facebook and Instagram have inspired thousands, if not millions, across the world. In 2019 he released All Good Things (September Publishing), "a compendium of art and photography inspired by the natural world and human endeavour," followed in 2021 by The Book of Change (September Publishing), "a brilliant awakening to our vast shared potential and creative energy for change, that reassembles, repurposes and repositions fragments from the past, combining them with new and fresh ways of seeing." This year he unleashed the incredible England on Fire (Watkins), a mind-blowing, hallucinatory trip into Albion's Psychic Landscape. With accompanying words from Mat Osman, it is a poetic, unhinged and magical journey across time, from Blake to Nash, Rego to Dean, and almost everything in-between.
Howard Cunnell is a writer of extraordinary depth. His novel The Sea on Fire (Picador) maps "new noir territory," whilst his stunning memoir Father and Sons (Picador) was a Radio 4 Book of The Week. His newest novel The Painter's Friend landed in 2021 to huge acclaim, swiftly becoming a favourite in The Margate Bookshop. It is an "intimate, dark, sincere, wry and exquisitely beautiful" story about art, gentrification, class and belonging. He has a PhD from the University of London and was a contributing editor to Jack Kerouac's On the Road - The Original Scroll. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Granta and Lion's Roar.