The Get Angela Carter festival celebrates Angela Carter’s Bristol connections around the 25th anniversary of her death and draws together various activities and events happening in Bristol and beyond, including the Strange Worlds Exhibition (10 Dec – 19 Mar) and the Fireworks Conference (9-10 Jan). For an overview of what’s on offer, please download this Calendar of Events pdf.

Angela Carter moved to Bristol in 1961 with her then husband Paul Carter and later relocated to near-by Bath, before leaving the West Country for good in 1976. Her formative years were spent in here; she studied English Literature at Bristol University and wrote her first three novels – nicknamed The Bristol Trilogy – whilst living in Clifton. Bristol landmarks such as Cabot Tower feature in these early novels, where decaying 60s Bristol is characterised as “provincial Bohemia”, a landscape which Zoe Brennan has coined “urban gothic” in her chapter in Literary Bristol.  She was part of the folk music movement, studied art at the RWA and used to frequent the Whiteladies Picture House.

One of the characters in her first novel Shadow Dance visits the Bristol Museum and contemplates the “Romany caravan” (now known as a wagon) and “Irish elk” (now renamed the Giant Deer”) which can still be seen today. She worked at the Arnolfini arts centre, which is where the second day of the Fireworks conference is taking place, though the location has changed since Carter’s day. Her second novel, The Magic Toyshop, which was made into a film directed by David Wheatley, was written while she was living in Bristol and this is also where she started working on her fifth novel, Love about the perils of being a vulnerable young female artist.

The festival website is curated by Dr Charlotte Crofts (Associate Professor in Filmmaking) and Dr Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Associate Professor in English Literature) both based at The University of the West of England, UWE Bristol, and also houses links to their publications and works inspired by Angela Carter. The aims of the festival are to acknowledge Bristol’s contribution to Angela Carter’s development as a writer, to foreground her subversive and de-mythologising project and to develop new audiences for her work.

You can subscribe to our mailing list, check out or useful links, find out about visiting Bristol and contact us for more information about the Fireworks Conference and RWA Exhibition.


Design

The website was designed by Charlotte Crofts using the WordPress.org Oblique Theme. The title and design of the website are inspired the film Get Carter (1971),* its poster and the seminal album cover for Roy Budd’s compelling soundtrack.

*Colleague Professor Andrew Spicer (UWE) is the author of The Man Who Got Carter: Michael Klinger Independent Production and the British Film Industry 1960-1980 (2013) which won the Best Book Prize for the British Association for Film, Television and Screen Studies.

FEATURED IMAGE: © Christine Molan

Angela Carter singing “Lucy Wan” in Bristol, 1967 / Pen and wash drawing / 2016

courtesy the artist


This website is supported by the Department of Arts and Cultural Industries, University of the West of England, UWE Bristol.