Hello and welcome to meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
In November, I was invited to the Charleston Literary Festival, an annual boutique literary event in the beautiful city of Charleston, South Carolina.
I arrived in the US on the 1st of November, less than a week before the election.
South Carolina is a red state, and the eventual Republican win there was always a given.
However, the literary festival felt like an oasis of liberal thought in a state which has implemented one of the most restrictive book ban regulations in the entire United States.
In this episode, I'd like to introduce you to three of the amazing women behind the Charleston Literary Festival.
They are Diana Reich, Sarah Moriarty, and Suzanne Pollock.
And to one of the star writers, Jennifer James Shapiro.
I started by asking the founding artistic director, Diana Reich, to tell us more about her involvement.
Well, this is the actual eighth year of the festival here in South Carolina.
Prior to that, I was the founder and artistic director of, of the Charleston Festival in East Sussex.
The Charleston Festival in East Sussex takes place at the former Bloomsbury domain that had been inhabited by Vanessa Bell, the sister Virginia Woolf, and her artist partner.
She's an artist.
She was an artist herself, of course, Duncan Grant.
And it was the favorite meeting place of a number of creative artists, intellectuals associated with blood, such as, obviously her sister, Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Ian Forster.
And the house was.
After the house was open for the public, I was involved in that project.
I felt very strongly that we didn't want it to become, you know, just a shrine to which people came to worship.
We wanted it to represent the dynamism of and the creativity of the people who'd once lived there.