LIBRARY LIFE

Gladstone's Library, Hawarden

By Rhian Waller - Gladstone's Library PR and marketing

Hello readers! We hope you enjoyed the festive season. We very much look forward to the months ahead.

Our new year resolution is to keep caring for our beautiful building, continue to showcase our collections and to give our guests the best possible service.

We have some hopes for the next 12 months, too:

• That you will pay us a visit (or several) in 2023

• That we see plenty of returning and new Readers, residential guests and diners

• That we make many more new Friends!

One event that might tempt you through our doors will take place this Saturday:

Introducing Sophie Rickard of the Rickard Sisters, a duo who specialise in adapting long and densely written classic novels into vibrantly illustrated graphic novels with accessible, freshly scripted prose. She is the first Writer in Residence of 2023 to stay at the Library.

Sophie Rickard.

Sophie Rickard.

Her masterclass is on Saturday, January 7 at 10.30am to 3.30pm (approx). It is for anyone looking to adapt a story (of your own or an existing narrative) into another form, whether you are scripting, storyboarding, updating or translating a work from prose to poetry or to the spoken word.

Sophie said: "The first process of adaptation is being a reader. I really, really like long, depressing books where everybody dies in the end. Scarlett is the opposite. She introduced me to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. One of the reasons we wanted to adapt it was so it could find a new audience. There’s a message there that’s important.

"During the process of adaptation, there’s a lot of consideration over what to include and what to leave out, how to present the themes of the novel, which social reference points are easy to grasp and which need more context, what can be translated visually and what has to be told in another way because you don’t have as much space for exposition."

Whether you make it to Sophie's class or not, we hope to see you in 2023.