An Audience with Alice Walker

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Celebrated writer and civil rights activist makes rare visit for Happy Soul Festival

One of the most celebrated African American writers and civil rights activists Alice makes a rare visit to the UK to support the Happy Soul Festival.

Alice Walker will be in conversation with writer and broadcaster Aminatta Forna on Friday 30 April. Doors open at 5.45pm. Community performances at 6.00pm. Main event with Alice Walker at 7.00pm - 10.00pm (BSL signed) - Wandsworth Civic Suite

The fourth Happy Soul Festival will showcase some great new film, arts and live music. They have a fantastic line-up of new Indian, US and UK movies and even films specially made by our local young people.

Born in 1944 to a sharecropper family in Georgia, Alice Walker's literary and political career stretches over four decades. As a child she attended a segregated black school before enrolling in college at Atlanta, where she quickly became involved in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

She went on to speak for the women's anti-nuclear and anti-apartheid movements. Alice published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland in 1970, but is probably best known for her 1983 work The Color Purple, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize (the first African American woman writer to be awarded it), and the American Book Award .

She has published several short stories, factual works and volumes of poetry, the most recent of which being Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003) and A Poem Travelled Down My Arm (2003). As a poet, Walker has explored a range of themes including freedom and individual expression, suicide, spirituality, love, ecology and civil rights. Her views on the devastating effects of female genital mutilation led to the 1993 documentary Warrior Marks, a collaboration with the British-Indian filmmaker Pratibha Parmar.

Alice’s most recent novel, Now is the Time to Open Your Heart (2005), tells the story of a woman’s spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time. Her writings have been translated worldwide and her books sold more than ten million copies.

April 8, 2010