Dickens theme for festival as city celebrates writer’s birth

The two-week Humber Mouth Festival, which starts on Saturday, will feature a range of events inspired by the writer and social critic widely regarded as the greatest of all Victorian novelists.

The Bafta award-winning actress Miriam Margolyes – best know for roles in TV series Blackadder, Martin Scorsese’s film the Age of Innocence and as Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter Films – will portray over 20 of Dickens’s best-loved characters.

Margolyes will aim to highlight the range of Dickens’s work, from the raucous humour of his characterisations to the darker aspects of his life and writing when she appears at Hull Truck Theatre on two consecutive days starting on Tuesday, July 3.

Pupils from Ganton Special School will take part in music and text-based Dickens-themed workshops called Spirit. The children will exploring the “hard times” and “great expectations” that go into preparing to be an athlete, and the qualities needed to triumph over adversity, organisers said.

The festival starts at 12.30pm on Saturday with a Poetry Jukebox at Central Library, when writer and poet Wendy Ann Greenhalgh will host a one-hour children’s sports-themed poetry workshop.

The children and their families will then be invited to read their poems out live or choose one from an online Poetry Jukebox.

The festival, which is now in its 19th year, closes at Hull Truck Theatre on Saturday, July 7, with satirical and political poet John Cooper Clarke who, since gaining fame as the support act for many seminal punk bands including the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Joy Division and The Fall, is now recognised as one of the country’s most important for poets and performers.

Other highlights include a horror writers’ night at Pave on Wednesday, June 27; a fantasy night hosted by Steven Erikson, creator of the Raven trilogies, at Carnegie Heritage Centre the following day; and a live acoustic set by Icicle Works singer Ian McNabb, who will also read from his autobiography when he appears at Pave on Wednesday, July 4.

For the full programme visit www.humbermouth.co.uk.