'Springfield Road' Launch Party October 1st 2014

Dear pledgers and followers and friends,

This past week, as the books arrived, I have been bowled over by your reactions, beautiful messages and pictures. Thank you. I made a tumblr of some of the photos I have been sent here  - Please send yours, I love them!

By now you should all have your invites to tomorrows massive booklaunchparty!
Its tomorrow, Wednesday October 1st, 6.30pm 'til midnight at Vout-O-Reenees!
Guest list is filling up fast, please RSVP to caitlin@unbound.co.uk

I'm delighted to announce that the wonderful Maggie Gee will be speaking and introducing the book alongside me. Maggie has championed this book since I sent her the final draft of 'Springfield Road' and it is a huge honour she'll be there.

There is a loose theme for the party 'Come As You Were 1972-1984'  - just interpret this as you please! Unbound's lovely Caitlin texted that she might come as a 'twinkle in her dads eye' - Maybe I will be there on rollar skates, with an afro, national health glasses, playing kiss chase with you all...haha! The fabulous Book Club Boutique DJ's will be there, playing ska, reggae and smash hits from the seventies and eighties.

Radio gigs and dates:

My music doc 'Little Miss Cornshucks' is on BBC World Service, BBC iplayer here!
 
Oct 2nd - Hastings fundraiser celebrating  Robert Tressell
 
Oct 3rd - BBC Radio Theatre  / live studio audience for Radio 4's 'Loose Ends'

Oct 5th - BBC LDN / Dotun Adebayo Show / 9pm 
 
Oct 8th - Bookslam, Clapham Grand, check out the website, tickets and line up here

There's lots of good stuff going on throughout Autumn, gigs, radio, parties and drinkys...

All details here at www.salenagodden.com



WOW! THANK YOU! We did it!

I thank each and everyone of you, for your faith, for every kindness and for all your help!

NOW TIME TO PARTY!

With much love and many thanks,

Salena Godden

press details:

SPRINGFIELD ROAD
A MEMOIR BY
SALENA GODDEN
Publication date September 30th 2014

Original Paperback £8.99 ISBN 978-1-78352-055-8
Available in all good bookshops

Hardback ISBN 978-1-78352-054-1
E-book ISBN 978-1-78352—56-5
Available from unbound.co.uk

‘Honest, grippingly readable, funny and uplifting’ Maggie Gee, OBE


As long ago as 2006, it was suggested to Salena Godden that she should write a memoir. The details of Salena’s life – a mixed-race child brought up in England in the seventies and eighties, whose Irish jazz-musician father leaves home when she is three and kills himself when she is nine, her Jamaican mother’s second marriage to a violent stepfather – had all the potential for the making of a ‘misery memoir’, the kind that were riding high in the bestseller lists at the time.

But Salena Godden is incapable of that kind of misery.  Joy and humour and love and tenderness just kept breaking through, and what resulted was Springfield Road – one of the most life-enhancing memoirs you will ever read.  Make no mistake, Salena does not shy away from the painful and the difficult episodes of her life, but she just can’t help herself also celebrating the ridiculous, the beautiful, the thousands of tiny unremembered acts of kindness and of love that are at once both personal and universal.

Salena Godden has been described as ‘the doyenne of the spoken word scene’ (Ian McMillan); ‘the Mae West madam of the Salon’ (The Sunday Times) and ‘everything the Daily Mail is terrified of’ (Kerrang! Magazine). She is known as The General of the Book Club Boutique, Soho’s louchest literary salon.

Earlier this summer Salena published Fishing In The Aftermath / Poems 1994-2014, marking twenty years of poetry and performance (Burning Eye Books). Her illustrious career as a spoken word performer is legendary. In Springfield Road there is a glimpse of what drove her to become the brilliantly, exuberantly self-made artist that she is.

As well as her writing and performing, Salena currently works with award-winning radio producer Rebecca Maxted. 'Try A Little Tenderness – The Lost Legacy of Little Miss Cornshucks' was aired on BBC Radio 4 in May to great acclaim. In June, she read an extract from Springfield Road and contributed a poem to the much-lauded documentary ‘The History of the N-Word’ broadcast on BBC Radio 4.  Salena has been appearing at festivals throughout the summer including Latitude, Port Eliot, The Green Gathering, Wilderness, Festival No.6 and the ‘Dylan Weekend’ at Laugharne 26-28th September.

Press statement written by Rachael Kerr at Unbound.

For further information and press queries please email: rachael@unbound.co.uk    

Check out Salena’s website: 'Waiting For Godden' -  http://www.salenagodden.com 

PS: This morning I woke up to this, it is very beautiful, thank you Oliva Spleen

"I am currently immersed in Salena Godden’s newly published memoir Springfield Road. Though I am not by birth a girl or a person of Jamaican / Irish descent; she retells her memories with such clarity that, when I have a nap after reading a chapter; in my dreams I am her and I wake confused that her story is not mine as it seems even more vivid and real than my own youthful reflections and memories." Read more: http://olispleen.tumblr.com