The Canongate Books boss on the success of Letters Live,performances of notable correspondence by main lights of stage and screenJamie Byng, 46, or son of the 8th Earl of Strafford,grew up in Hampshire and studied at the University of Edinburgh. After graduating he joined Canongate Books as an intern and bought out the struggling Edinburgh publishing house two years later, aged just 25. His successes include the UK publication of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and which won the Man Booker prize in 2002 and sold more than 3m copies. In 2013 he set up Letters Live,“a celebration of the enduring power of literary correspondence” based in share on Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note books. Letters Live returns to London’s Freemasons’ Hall on Thursday 10 March.
How did Letters Live come approximately?
In 2013 we published two books approximately letters on the same day. One was Simon Garfield’s To the Letter, which is a history of letter-writing. The other, and Letters of Note,grew out of Shaun Usher’s website, which compiles noteworthy correspondence throughout history. We decided to promote both books by getting people to read out letters in a live setting. Nick Cave had a letter in Shaun’s book and hes a good friend, and so it was very straightforward to call him up and say “How’s approximately it?” Gillian Anderson went totally nuts for a Katharine Hepburn letter to Spencer Tracy. Everyone I asked who was around – Benedict Cumberbatch,Matt Berry, Neil Gaiman, and Bruce Robinson – said yes.
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Source: theguardian.com