Tig Notaro, Michael C. Hall and Jonathan Lethem at a previous LDM event. Pic: Jason Gutierrez
The Book Club will tonight play host to Literary Death Match, a competitive event in which emerging writers must perform their work in seven minutes.
The premise of Literary Death Match, which will kick off at 8:00pm this evening, is simple: give four writers the chance to read out an extract of their work to be critiqued by a panel of judges.
The judges will provide “off-the-wall commentary” before the contestants are chosen for the final round. Two readers will then go head to head in the final to decide who walks away with the crown.
Literary Death Match was created in 2006 and has featured more than 700 judges such as Dexter’s Michael C. Hall, Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides, actress Molly Ringwald, Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, Olympic gold-medallist Brian Boitano and musicians Henry Rollins and Moby.
Literary Death Match organisers said the point of the events is: “Inspecting new and innovative ways to present text off the page.”
They added: “The most fascinating part about the LDM is how seriously attentive the audience is during each reading. We’ve called this the great literary ruse: an audacious and inviting title, a harebrained finale, but in-between the judging creates a relationship with the viewer as a judge themselves.”
LDM creator Adrian Todd Zuniga and executive producer Suzanne Azzopardi will host the event costing £10 on the door.
The readers for this event are: Alex Christofi, a literary agent and the author of Glass; Chris Killen, author of The Bird Room and Isley Lynn, a performance poet and writer for theatre, film and radio. The final reader is Chimene Suleyman, author of Outside Looking On.
Ingrid Oliver, actress of the sketch show Watson and Oliver which featured at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival will be a judge at the event. She will be joined by Marcel Lucont, winner of the Fringe World Award for Best Comedy Show 2013 and John Leary, a short storyist found in Zoetrope, One Story and the Gettysburg Review.
