Luncheon Speakers Announced
VABook! announces Luncheon Speaker Doug Marlette and Crime Wave Luncheon Speaker Lee Child
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$45 per person
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Novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette will be the speaker for the thirteenth annual Virginia Festival of the Book Luncheon on Thursday, March 22 at 11:45 am at the Omni Charlottesville Hotel. Best known for his editorial cartoons and his comic strip, Kudzu, Marlette has also just written his second novel, Magic Time.
Kudzu is syndicated in newspapers worldwide, and his work is collected in 19 volumes, including In Your Face: A Cartoonist at Work, Gone With The Kudzu, I Feel Your Pain, and A Town So Backwards Even the Episcopalians Handle Snakes. In addition to the Pulitzer, he has been awarded the National Headliners Award for Consistently Outstanding Editorial Cartoons, the Robert D. Kennedy Memorial Award for editorial cartooning, and First Prize in the John Fischetti Memorial Cartoon Award. He is also the only cartoonist ever awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.
Mr. Marlette’s work has appeared in major newspapers, magazines, television, and radio programs, including Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC’s “Today,” CBS’s “Morning News,” ABC’s “Good Morning America” and “Nightline,” and on NPR. He has also contributed to The New Republic, The Nation, Men’s Journal, and The Paris Review.
His first novel, The Bridge, based on his grandparent’s experience in 1930s labor organizing in North Carolina’s textile industry, was voted Best Book of The Year for Fiction by the Southeast Booksellers Association (SEBA) and was also voted one of the best books of the last five years by BookSense, the American Booksellers Association. Marlette, a North Carolina native, was inducted into the UNC Journalism Hall of Fame in 2002. He currently is appointed a Gaylord Distinguished visiting Lecturer at the University of Oklahoma’s College of Journalism and Mass Communication
VABook! is also pleased to announce that Lee Child will be the speaker for this year’s Crime Wave luncheon on Saturday, March 24 at noon at the Omni Charlottesville Hotel. Child is the author of the Jack Reacher series which consists of ten novels so far, from 1997’s Killing Floor to the soon-to-be-released Bad Luck and Trouble.
Child, a native of England, attended law school in Sheffield, England and worked part-time in theater before joining Granada Television for what turned out to be a eighteen-year career as a presentation director, during which time his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crime, Prime Suspect, and Crack. He was fired in 1995 as a result of corporate restructuring, but decided to turn this crisis into an opportunity and bought six dollars’ worth of paper and pencils and wrote a book, Killing Floor, which was an immediate success and launched the series that has grown in sales and impact with every new installment.
Lee resides in Manhattan, the south of France, or an airplane in between the two, and enjoys reading, listening to music, watching the Yankees, Aston Villa, and Marseilles soccer. He is married with a grown-up daughter.
The VABook! luncheons are among the few paid events of the free five-day literary festival (both events are $45 per person).
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Virginia Festival of the Book is a program of the
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities
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phone: (434)924-6890 | fax: (434) 296-4714 | vabook@virginia.edu