Now in its sixth year, The Penzance Literary Festival has become a celebrated annual event pulling in national names and local authors.

Renowned for its friendly atmosphere, and a strong audience attendance, the past two years have also seen a fringe forming around the main events hosted by the Penzance Litfest.

Building on last year’s successful pop-p gallery presented in conjunction with the annual event, local artists group fastj&m is presenting an exhibition of current work titled ‘ex nihilo'.

This year’s attraction will also include ‘fastj&m: sessions’: a lecture series and symposium celebrating the conversation between the arts, politics, popular culture and literature.

The list of speakers and panelists includes author Tariq Goddard, founder of Zer0 Books and Repeater Books and one of Waterstone’s "Faces of the Future".

Dawn Foster, political commentator for Newsnight and Sky news as well a columnist for The Guardian.

Bambo Soyinka, head of the prestigious creative writing department at Bath/Spa University, and Jerome Fletcher, associate professor for performance writing at Falmouth University.

Topics range from forthcoming books to the power of type design, women in medicine, women in the workplace, writing for technophobes and technophiles, building utopias and breaking barriers.

The evening symposium on ‘Radical Publishing for the New Millennium’ moderated by James Kearns, lecturer at Cornwall Collage, will explore both content and delivery models for presenting new ideas and original content largely ignored by traditional publishers.

Tickets for the events are on sale and can be booked online at crbo.co.uk. Full details of events and ticketing can be found on www.fastjam.co.uk

IMAGES (attached):

i) sessions.jpg – poster/graphic for the lecture series

ii) symposium.jpg –poster/graphic for the evening symposium

iii) tariq_goddard.jpg – author, whose 2002 debut novel ‘Homage to a Firing Squad’ was shortlisted for the Whitbread (Costa) Prize