00:00I'm on the stage at Playhouse Whitley Bay, the home of Bay Tales.
00:06Bay Tales returns to Playhouse Whitley Bay on Saturday the 28th of February
00:10with a weekend of crime fiction panels, author interviews, book signings and community events.
00:15It's a chance for locals to enjoy storytelling, meet authors and take part in reading related activities.
00:21I've been running workshops since 2012, creative writing workshops,
00:25and then we started doing events with some of the writers in the workshops.
00:30And then in 2021, we went into lockdown.
00:33I foolishly put something out on Facebook saying,
00:35would anybody like to do this one Wednesday night virtually?
00:39And then we ran virtually every Wednesday for 22 weeks with 10 authors each week reading from their work.
00:46And on one of those events, we were talking to Anne Cleaves and she said,
00:51but you are going to do this in real life when everything reopens, aren't you?
00:55And I would never say no to Anne.
00:57I love Bay Tales, partly because it's set in Whitley Bay, which is where I live.
01:02And it's bringing loads and loads of people in and they're staying in local guest houses
01:07and they're eating in local cafes and restaurants.
01:10The authors love it because they have great sales and publishers love it because so many books get sold.
01:17But really, it's a day for readers.
01:18I think it's a day for readers to come together, have a brilliant time, come and chat to the authors,
01:26make new friends, and everybody comes away feeling that they've had a great welcome, I think.
01:36We're just really keen to try and encourage people to read more generally.
01:41It's the National Year of Reading this year and we have someone from the Literacy Trust joining us on the
01:46day.
01:48And it may seem daft because obviously the people who are here, they love books.
01:52They've come to a book festival, they're keen on books.
01:54But what the Literacy Trust are interested in is engaging those people who will then go out into their communities
02:01and hopefully do a readathon or a book swap or set up a book club and hopefully engage new readers
02:12as well.
02:13Helen Pepper, she was a crime scene investigator.
02:16She's now a lecturer at Tayside University.
02:19She's come to take people's fingerprints and send them, like give them, it's some sort of memento she's preparing for
02:26them.
02:27But it's really cool.
02:27She's going to be doing fingerprints.
02:30So, yeah, in addition to all these wonderful authors, we've got Ellie Griffiths coming, Belinda Bower.
02:36We've got the debuts panel.
02:38We've also got our first overseas author, Ragnar Yonason, coming from Iceland.
02:44So, again, it just gets bigger and better every year and it's really exciting.
02:48Bay Tales runs from Friday the 27th of February to Sunday the 1st of March,
02:53giving locals three days to explore crime fiction, meet authors and join community activities.
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