Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died aged 62 (AP)

Richard Dawkins: Illness made Christopher Hitchens a symbol of the honesty and dignity of atheism

On 7 October, I recorded a long conversation with Christopher Hitchens in Houston, Texas, for the Christmas edition of New Statesman which I was guest-editing.

He looked frail, and his voice was no longer the familiar Richard Burton boom; but, though his body had clearly been diminished by the brutality of cancer, his mind and spirit had not. Just two months before his death, he was still shining his relentless light on uncomfortable truths, still speaking the unspeakable (“The way I put it is this: if you’re writing about the history of the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism, you can take out the word ‘fascist’, if you want, for Italy, Portugal, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Austria and replace it with ‘extreme-right Catholic party’”), still leading the charge for human freedom and dignity (“The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously.

The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do”) and still encouraging others to stand up fearlessly for truth and reason (“Stridency is the least you should muster … It’s the shame of your colleagues that they don’t form ranks and say, ‘Listen, we’re going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and obfuscating elements’.”).

The following day, I presented him with an award in my name at the Atheist Alliance International convention, and I can today derive a little comfort from having been able to tell him during the presentation that day how much he meant to those of us who shared his goals.

I told him that he was a man whose name would be joined, in the history of the atheist/secular movement, with those of Bertrand Russell, Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Paine, David Hume. What follows is based on my speech, now sadly turned into the past tense.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know. He was a reader whose breadth of reading was simultaneously so deep and comprehensive as to deserve the slightly stuffy word “learned” – except that Christopher was the least stuffy learned person you could ever meet.

He was a debater who would kick the stuffing out of a hapless victim, yet did it with a grace that disarmed his opponent while simultaneously eviscerating him. He was emphatically not of the school that thinks the winner of a debate is he who shouts loudest. His opponents might have shouted and shrieked. Indeed they did. But Hitch didn’t need to shout, for he could rely instead on his words, his polymathic store of facts and allusions, his commanding generalship of the field of discourse, and the forked lightning of his wit.

More at the Belfast Telegraph

Dans l’histoire des négociations climatiques, il y aura eu l’emballement médiatique de Copenhague en 2009, la reconstruction migraineuse de Cancún en 2010 et le vide intersidéral résigné de Durban en 2011. Avant même la signature d’un accord, qui pourrait survenir samedi, certains participants évoquaient vendredi une immense «déception», voire un «échec désastreux». Petit tour d’horizon des points de litige.

La survie de Kyoto

Durant deux semaines à Durban, l’Europe a joué au saint-Bernard de Kyoto en mettant un deal clair sur la table : l’Union européenne est prête à signer pour une seconde période d’engagements après 2012, si, et seulement si, tous les pays – les gros émetteurs comme les Etats-Unis ou la Chine, mais aussi le Brésil, l’Inde, l’Afrique du Sud… – souscrivent à un accord global de réduction d’émissions dans les années à venir. Le hic, c’est que le statut de cet accord constitue le nœud gordien des négociations.

A 18 heures vendredi, les ministres sont partis discuter en «indaba» (terme zulu désignant des palabres sous la tutelle du chef) sur la base d’un texte produit par la présidence sud-africaine. Ce document suggère que l’accord global pourrait être un «cadre légal applicable à tous» («legal framework», en anglais), s’inscrivant dans la Convention onusienne sur le climat. Cette formulation est la clé du blocage. L’Europe souhaite un «accord juridiquement contraignant» de réduction d’émissions de CO₂, ce que refusent mordicus les Etats-Unis. La Chine, en revanche, s’est fortement assouplie en envisageant un tel accord, à condition qu’il prenne effet après 2020. Sentant qu’ils allaient passer pour les bad guys de la négo, les Américains se sont montrés plus ouverts à «une plateforme légale commune» ou «partagée», termes juridiques flous censés désigner ce fameux «cadre légal».

«Un cadre légal ? Ça ne veut rien dire, rigole Pierre Radanne, vieux briscard des négociations, familier de la novlangue climatique. Le protocole de Kyoto est déjà un cadre légal !» «Avec un tel texte, on passe du mauvais au pire, soupire Pablo Solon, l’ancien chef de la délégation bolivienne. Si l’Europe valide une telle formulation, elle cède aux Américains et aux Chinois.»

…

Lire la suite...  “La Liberation” …>

Bankers Gear Up for the Rape of Greece, as Social Democrats Vote for National Suicide

By MICHAEL HUDSON

The fight for Europe’s future is being waged in Athens and other Greek cities to resist financial demands that are the 21st century’s version of an outright military attack. The threat of bank overlordship is not the kind of economy-killing policy that affords opportunities for heroism in armed battle, to be sure. Destructive financial policies are more like an exercise in the banality of evil – in this case, the pro-creditor assumptions of the European Central Bank (ECB), EU and IMF (egged on by the U.S. Treasury).

As Vladimir Putin pointed out some years ago, the neoliberal reforms put in Boris Yeltsin’s hands by the Harvard Boys in the 1990s caused Russia to suffer lower birth rates, shortening life spans and emigration – the greatest loss in population growth since World War II. Capital flight is another consequence of financial austerity. The ECB’s proposed “solution” to Greece’s debt problem is thus self-defeating. It only buys time for the ECB to take on yet more Greek government debt, leaving all EU taxpayers to get the bill. It is to avoid this shift of bank losses onto taxpayers that Angela Merkel in Germany has insisted that private bondholders must absorb some of the loss resulting from their bad investments.

The bankers are trying to get a windfall by using the debt hammer to achieve what warfare did in times past. They are demanding privatization of public assets (on credit, with tax deductibility for interest so as to leave more cash flow to pay the bankers). This transfer of land, public utilities and interest as financial booty and tribute to creditor economies is what makes financial austerity like war in its effect.

Socrates said that ignorance must be the root of all evil, because no one deliberately sets out to be bad. But the economic “medicine” of driving debtors into poverty and forcing the selloff of their public domain has become socially accepted wisdom taught in today’s business schools. One would think that after fifty years of austerity programs and privatization selloffs to pay bad debts, the world has learned enough about causes and consequences.

The banking profession deliberately chooses to be ignorant. “Good accepted practice” is bolstered by Nobel Economics Prizes to provide a cloak of plausible deniability when markets “unexpectedly” are hollowed out and new investment slows as a result of financially bleeding economies, medieval-style while wealth is siphoned up to the top of the economic pyramid.

My friend David Kelley likes to cite Molly Ivins’ quip: “It’s hard to convince people that you are killing them for their own good.” The EU’s attempt to do this didn’t succeed in Iceland. And like the Icelanders, the Greek protesters have had their fill of neoliberal-learned ignorance that austerity, unemployment and shrinking markets are the path to prosperity, not deeper poverty. So we must ask what motivates central banks to promote tunnel-visioned managers who follow the orders and logic of a system that imposes needless suffering and waste – all to pursue the banal obsession that banks must not lose money?

One must conclude that the EU’s new central planners (isn’t that what Hayek said was the Road to Serfdom?) are acting as class warriors by demanding that all losses are to be suffered by economies imposing debt deflation and permitting creditors to grab assets. As if this won’t make the problem worse. This ECB hard line is backed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner, evidently so that U.S. institutions not lose their bets on derivative plays they have written up.

This is a repeat of Geithner’s intervention to prevent Irish debt alleviation. The result is that we enter absurdist territory when the ECB and Treasury insist on “voluntary renegotiation” on the ground that some bank may have taken an AIG-type gamble in offering default insurance or bets that would make it lose so much money that yet another bailout would be necessary. It is as if financial gambling is economically necessary, not part of Las Vegas.
Why should this matter a drachma to the Greeks? It is an intra-European bank regulatory problem. Yet to sidestep it, the ECB is telling Greece to sell off its water and sewer rights, ports, islands and other infrastructure.

This veers on financial theater of the absurd. Of course some special interest always benefits from systemic absurdity, banal as it may be. Financial markets already have priced in the expectation that Greece will default in the end. It is only a question of when. Banks are using the time to take as much as they can and pass the losses onto the ECB, EU and IMF – “public” institutions that have more leverage than private creditors. So bankers become the sponsors of absurdity – and of the junk economics spouted so unthinkingly by the enforcers, cheerleaders for the banality of evil. It doesn’t really matter if their names are Trichet, Geithner or Papandreou. They are just kindred lumps on the vampire squid of creditor claims.

The Greek crowds demonstrating before Parliament in Syntagma Square are providing their counterpart to the “Arab spring.” But what really can they do, short of violence – as long as the police and military side with the government that itself is siding with foreign creditors?

The most effective tactic is to demand a national referendum on whether to accept the ECB’s terms for austerity, tax increases, public spending cutbacks and selloffs. This is how Iceland’s president stopped his country’s Social Democratic leadership from committing the economy to ruinous (and legally unnecessary) payments to Gordon Brown’s Labour Party demands and those of the Dutch for the Icesave and even the Kaupthing bailouts.

The only legal basis for demanding payment of the EU’s bailout of French and German banks – and U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s demand that debts be sacrosanct, not the lives of citizens – is public acceptance and acquiescence in such policy. Otherwise the imposition of debt may be treated simply as an act of financial warfare.

National economies have the right to defend themselves against such aggression. The crowd’s leaders can insist that in the absence of a referendum, they intend to elect a political slate committed to outright debt annulment. International law prohibits nations from treating their own nationals differently from foreigners, so all debts in specified categories would have to be annulled to create a Clean Slate. (The German Monetary Reform of 1947 imposed by the Allied Powers was the most successful Clean Slate in modern times. Freeing the German economy from debt [including reparations to Greece for the havoc of WW2, Editors] it became the basis of that nation’s economic miracle.)

This is not the first such proposal for Greece. Toward the end of the 3rd century BC, Sparta’s kings Agis and Cleomenes urged a debt cancellation, as did Nabis after them. Plutarch tells the story, and also explains the tragic flaw of this policy. Absentee owners who had borrowed to buy real estate backed the debt cancellation, gaining an enormous windfall.

This would be much more the case today than in times past, now that the great bulk of debt is mortgage debt. Imagine what a debt cancellation would do for the Donald Trumps of the economy – having acquired property on credit with minimum equity investment of their own, suddenly owing nothing to the banks! The aim of financial-fiscal reform should be to free the economy from financial overhead that is technologically unnecessary. To avoid giving a free lunch to absentee owners, a debt cancellation would have to go hand in hand with an economic rent tax. The public sector would receive the land’s rental value as its fiscal base.

This happens to have been the basic aim of 19th-century free market economists: tax land and nature – and natural monopolies – rather than taxing labor and capital goods. The aim was to keep for the public what nature and public infrastructure spending create. A century ago it was believed that monopolies such as the privatizers now set their eyes should be operated by the public sector; or, if left in public hands, their prices would be regulated to keep them in line with actual costs of production. Where private owners already have taken possession of land, mines or monopolies, the rental revenue from such ownership privileges would be fully taxed. This would include the financial privilege that banks enjoy in credit creation.

The way to lower costs is to lower “bad” taxes that add to the price of production, headed by taxes on labor and capital, sales taxes and value-added taxes. By contrast, rent taxes collect the economy’s “free lunch,” and thus leave less available to be pledged to banks to capitalize into debt service on higher loans. Shifting the Greek tax burden off labor onto property would reduce the supply price of labor, and also reduce the price of housing that is being bid up by bank credit.

A land tax shift was the primary reform proposal from the 18th and 19th century, from the Physiocrats and Adam Smith down through John Stuart Mill and America’s Progressive Era reformers. The aim was to free markets from the landed aristocracy’s hereditary rents stemming from the medieval Viking conquest. This would free economies from feudalism, bringing prices in line with socially necessary costs of production.

Every government has the right to levy taxes, as long as they do it uniformly to domestic property owners as well as to foreign owners. Short of re-nationalizing the land and infrastructure, fully taxing its economic rent (access payments for sites whose value is created by nature or by public improvements) would take back for the Greek authorities what creditors are trying to grab.

This classical threat of 19th century reformers is the response that the Greeks can make to the European Central Bank. They can remind the rest of the world that it was, after all, the ideal of free markets as expressed from Adam Smith through John Stuart Mill in England, and underlay U.S. public spending, regulatory agencies and tax policy during its period of take-off.

How strange (and sad) it is that Greece’s own ruling Socialist Party, whose leader heads the Second International, has rejected this centuries-old reform program. It is not Communism. It is not even inherently revolutionary, or at least was not at the time it was formulated. It is socialism of the reformist type that two centuries of classical political economy culminated in.

But it is the kind of free markets against which the ECB is fighting – backed by Treasury Secretary Geithner’s shrill exhortations from the United States. Obama says nothing, leaving it all to Wall Street bureaucrats to set national economic policy. Is this evil? Or is it just passive and indifferent? Does it make much of a difference as far as the end result is concerned?

To sum up, the aims of foreign financial aggression are the same as military conquest: land and the public domain. But nations have the right to tax their rental yield over and above a return to capital investment. Contrary to EU demands for “internal devaluation” (wage cuts) as a means of lowering the price of Greek labor to make it more competitive, reducing living standards is not the way to go. That reduces labor productivity while eroding the internal market, leading to a deteriorating spiral of economic shrinkage.

The need for a popular referendum

Every government has the right and indeed the political obligation to protect its prosperity and livelihood so as to keep its population at home rather than drive them abroad or drive them into a position of financial dependency on rentiers. At the heart of economic democracy is the principle that no sovereign nation is committed to relinquish its public domain or its taxing, and hence its economic prosperity and future livelihood, to foreigners or for that matter to a domestic financial class. This is why Iceland voted “No” in the debt referendum. Its economy is recovering.

Ireland voted “Yes” and now faces a new Great Emigration to rival that which followed the poverty and starvation driven emigrations of the mid-19th century. If Greece does not draw a line here, it will be a victory for financial and fiscal aggression imposing debt peonage.

Read the rest of the article here 

Greece: bond slave to Europe

• • Mark Weisbrot
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 June 2011 22.15 BS

Without sovereign control of their country’s debt, the Greek people are being punished with extortion by the ECB and IMF

Imagine that in its worst year of our recent recession, the United States government had decided to reduce its federal budget deficit by more than $800bn – cutting spending and raising taxes to meet this goal. Imagine that, as a result of these measures, the economy had worsened and unemployment soared to more than 16%; and then the president pledged another $400bn in spending cuts and tax increases this year. What do you think would be the public reaction?

It would probably be similar to what we are seeing in Greece today, including mass demonstrations and riots – because that is what the Greek government has done. The above numbers are simply adjusted for the relative size of the two economies. Of course, the US government would never dare to do what the Greek government has done: recall that the budget battle in April,which had House Republicans threatening to shut down the government, resulted in spending cuts of just $38bn.

What makes the Greek public even angrier is that their collective punishment is being meted out by foreign powers – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. This highlights perhaps the biggest problem of unaccountable, rightwing, supranational institutions. Greece would not be going through this if it were not a member of a currency union. If it had leaders of its own who were stupid enough to massively cut spending and raise taxes during a recession, those government officials would be replaced. And then a new government would do what the vast majority of governments in the world did during the world recession of 2009 – the opposite: that is, deploy an economic stimulus, or what economists call counter-cyclical policies.

And if that required a renegotiation of the public debt, that is what the country would do. This is going to happen even under the European authorities, but first, they are putting the country through years of unnecessary suffering. And they are taking advantage of the situation to privatise public assets at fire sale prices and restructure the Greek state and economy, so that it is more to their liking.

I have maintained for some time that the Greek government has had more bargaining power than it has used, and the past week’s events seem to confirm this. Because of the massive opposition to further economic self-destruction – the latest polls show that 80% of Greeks are opposed to making any more concessions to the European authorities – the Greek government has so far been unable to reach an agreement with the IMF for the release of their latest loan tranche on 29 June.

So what happened? The IMF is going to hand over the money anyway, while the European authorities (who are in control of IMF decision-making on matters of Greek economic policy) continue to quarrel over how long they will postpone Greece’s inevitable debt restructuring, roll-over, or whatever they choose to call it.

That’s because the prospect of a disorderly default – as would be triggered by the IMF simply sticking to its programme and not lending Greece the money – is too scary for the European authorities to contemplate. For this reason, the many news articles about the possibility of a financial collapse comparable to what happened after Lehman Brothers went under in 2008 are somewhat exaggerated. The European authorities are not going to let that happen over a measly $17bn loan installment. The events of the past week were all a game of brinkmanship, and the European authorities had to blink because the Greek government, as much as it wanted to, couldn’t get approval for the deal.

A democratically accountable Greek government would take a much harder line with the European authorities. For example, they could start with a moratorium on interest payments, which are currently running at 6.6% of GDP. (This is a huge interest rate burden, and the IMF projects it to increase to 8.6% by 2014. For comparison, despite all the noise about the US debt burden, net interest on the US public debt is currently at 1.4% of GDP.) That would release enough funds for a serious stimulus programme, while they negotiate with the authorities for the inevitable debt write-down. Of course, the European authorities – who are looking at this from the point of view of their big banks and creditors’ interests generally – would be enraged, but at least this would be a reasonable opening bargaining position.

The IMF’s latest review of its agreement with Greece suggests that the Euro, for the Greek economy, is still 20-34% overvalued. This makes a recovery through “internal devaluation” – that is, keeping unemployment extremely high and therefore lowering wages to make the economy more internationally competitive – an even more remote possibility than it would otherwise be. But the big problem is that the country’s fiscal policy is going in the wrong direction; and of course, they cannot use monetary policy because that is controlled by the ECB.

The European authorities have more than enough money to finance a recovery programme in Greece, and to bail out their banks if they don’t want them to take the inevitable losses on their loans. There is no excuse for this never-ending punishment of the Greek people.

from “The Guardian”

Dr Watson. Baker Street. Telegram: “Come at once if convenient – if inconvenient come all the same”. The word game and play, many of us recall enjoying among pauses, pages thoughts and whispers, we, as readers at the prospect of strong emotional involvement. All this came to mind, as I have come upon a piece of wrapped, filthy paper I once had archived and long forgotten: “this Agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply…”…. and I have no idea which of Doyle’s lunatic stories does it come from. But there, doesn’t this phrase stand there worth a read?

Victor HUGO (1802-1885)

Bièvre

A Mademoiselle Louise B.
Un horizon fait à souhait pour le plaisir des yeux.

FÉNELON.

I

Oui, c’est bien le vallon ! le vallon calme et sombre !
Ici l’été plus frais s’épanouit à l’ombre.
Ici durent longtemps les fleurs qui durent peu.
Ici l’âme contemple, écoute, adore, aspire,
Et prend pitié du monde, étroit et fol empire
Où l’homme tous les jours fait moins de place à Dieu !

Une rivière au fond ; des bois sur les deux pentes.
Là, des ormeaux, brodés de cent vignes grimpantes ;
Des prés, où le faucheur brunit son bras nerveux ;
Là, des saules pensifs qui pleurent sur la rive,
Et, comme une baigneuse indolente et naïve,
Laissent tremper dans l’eau le bout de leurs cheveux.

Là-bas, un gué bruyant dans des eaux poissonneuses
Qui montrent aux passants lés jambes des faneuses ;
Des carrés de blé d’or ; des étangs au flot clair ;
Dans l’ombre, un mur de craie et des toits noirs de suie ;
Les ocres des ravins, déchirés par la pluie ;
Et l’aqueduc au loin qui semble un pont de l’air.

Et, pour couronnement à ces collines vertes,
Les profondeurs du ciel toutes grandes ouvertes,
Le ciel, bleu pavillon par Dieu même construit,
Qui, le jour, emplissant de plis d’azur l’espace,
Semble un dais suspendu sur le soleil qui passe,
Et dont on ne peut voir les clous d’or que la nuit !

Oui, c’est un de ces lieux où notre coeur sent vivre
Quelque chose des cieux qui flotte et qui l’enivre ;
Un de ces lieux qu’enfant j’aimais et je rêvais,
Dont la beauté sereine, inépuisable, intime,
Verse à l’âme un oubli sérieux et sublime
De tout ce que la terre et l’homme ont de mauvais !

II

Si dès l’aube on suit les lisières
Du bois, abri des jeunes faons,
Par l’âpre chemin dont les pierres
Offensent les mains des enfants,
A l’heure où le soleil s’élève,
Où l’arbre sent monter la sève,
La vallée est comme un beau rêve.
La brume écarte son rideau.
Partout la nature s’éveille ;
La fleur s’ouvre, rose et vermeille ;
La brise y suspend une abeille,
La rosée une goutte d’eau !

Et dans ce charmant paysage
Où l’esprit flotte, où l’oeil s’enfuit,
Le buisson, l’oiseau de passage,
L’herbe qui tremble et qui reluit,
Le vieil arbre que l’âge ploie,
Le donjon qu’un moulin coudoie,
Le ruisseau de moire et de soie,
Le champ où dorment les aïeux,
Ce qu’on voit pleurer ou sourire,
Ce qui chante et ce qui soupire,
Ce qui parle et ce qui respire,
Tout fait un bruit harmonieux !

III

Et si le soir, après mille errantes pensées,
De sentiers en sentiers en marchant dispersées,
Du haut de la colline on descend vers ce toit
Qui vous a tout le jour, dans votre rêverie,
Fait regarder en bas, au fond de la prairie,
Comme une belle fleur qu’on voit ;

Et si vous êtes là, vous dont la main de flamme
Fait parler au clavier la langue de votre âme ;
Si c’est un des moments, doux et mystérieux,
Ou la musique, esprit d’extase et de délire
Dont les ailes de feu font le bruit d’une lyre,
Réverbère en vos chants la splendeur de vos yeux ;

Si les petits enfants, qui vous cherchent sans cesse,
Mêlent leur joyeux rire au chant qui vous oppresse ;
Si votre noble père à leurs jeux turbulents
Sourit, en écoutant votre hymne commencée,
Lui, le sage et l’heureux, dont la jeune pensée
Se couronne de cheveux blancs ;

Alors, à cette voix qui remue et pénètre,
Sous ce ciel étoilé qui luit à la fenêtre,
On croit à la famille, au repos, au bonheur ;
Le coeur se fond en joie, en amour, en prière ;
On sent venir des pleurs au bord de sa paupière ;
On lève au ciel les mains en s’écriant : Seigneur !

IV

Et l’on ne songe plus, tant notre âme saisie
Se perd dans la nature et dans la poésie,
Que tout prés, par les bois et les ravins caché,
Derrière le ruban de ces collines bleues,
A quatre de ces pas que nous nommons des lieues,
Le géant Paris est couché !

On ne s’informe plus si la ville fatale,
Du monde en fusion ardente capitale,
Ouvre et ferme à tel jour ses cratères fumants ;
Et de quel air les rois, à l’instant où nous sommes,
Regardent bouillonner dans ce Vésuve d’hommes
La lave des événements !

8 juillet 1831

Live coverage of the Royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton which will take place at Westminster Abbey on April 29.

For exclusive details, read The Telegraph.

Une adaptation extravagante de la célèbre pièce de Tennessee Williams. Crédits photo : Pacome POIRIER/Wikispectacle/Pacome POIRIER/Wikispectacle

À propos de la critique, le metteur en scène Lee Breuer cite Blanche DuBois dans la pièce de Tennessee Williams (qui entre au répertoire du Français) : « Peu importe qui vous êtes, j’ai toujours compté sur la bonté des inconnus. » Il en faut beaucoup pour admirer son extravagante adaptation d’Un tramway nommé Désir. L’Américain semble avoir voulu illustrer chaque mot de la traduction de Jean-Michel Déprats. Il exploite toute la machinerie du plateau, s’appuie sur des petites mains toutes vêtues de noir, comme dans le théâtre kabuki, pour apporter les accessoires aux acteurs et changer de décors (des estampes japonaises). Il dirige aussi des musiciens et des chanteurs. En tentant de créer une atmosphère, il alourdit le propos et distrait l’attention. Reste à se concentrer sur le texte et les comédiens : Anne Kessler (hésitante ce soir-là, mais touchante), Françoise Gillard (enfantine Stella), Éric Ruf (étonnant Kowalski) ou Grégory Gadebois (attachant Mitch transformé en motard tatoué).

Un tramway nommé désir, Comédie-Française Salle Richelieu, place Colette (1er) Tél. : 0 825 10 16 80. Horaires : en alternance, soirées, 20 h 30, matinées, 14 h. Places : de 5 à 39 € . Durée : 3 h avec entracte jusqu’au 2 juin.

[http://blog.lefigaro.fr]

Carrie Cohen reading from “Apartment” by YJ Zhu

Elizabeth Bower reading from “Gusul” by Adnan Mahmutovic

Sarah Le Fevre reading from “Overnight Miracles” by AJ Ashworth

Silas Hawkins reading from “Out of Season” by Mary O’Shea

Sam Taradash introduces Maggie Gee

Before announcing the results Maggie Gee spoke about all the stories and described the judging process.

Steve Moran tries to steal the priceless 2011 WH prize mug from Mary O’Shea

And the winning entries, as chosen by Maggie Gee, are:

1st Prize:
“Out of Season” by Mary O’Shea (Ireland)

Equal runners up:
“Apartment” by Y. J. Zhu (USA/China)
“Homecoming” by Alex Barr (Wales)

Thanks to everyone who made the competition and the event possible, starting with the all the writers who create new short stories, pellucid visions of worlds we would never otherwise see.

About the stories and authors here

About the actors here

More details to follow…

[Willesden Herald]