The huge Yurt at the heart of the festival is the home of the festival’s edition of BookSlam, London’s most sexily cerebral club night, featuring cutting-edge literature and acoustic music presented by award-winning novelist Patrick Neate. And the third stage, in the Sunken Gardens, is filled with vibrant, beguiling dance from around the globe 

The Sanctuary stage, hosted by DJ Ritu from BBC London 94.9 FM, kicks off with The Téa Hodzic Trio. Once a child star on Yugoslav TV, and in the years since here in the UK, vocalist with Szapora and Penguin Café Orchestra, Téa brings her unique trio to this year’s festival, with Oliver Wilson-Dickson on fiddle and Luke Carver Doss on accordion. Especially for the festival, she’s been leading some songwriting workshops with pupils at the local Charles Dickens Primary School and will be joined by them on stage to perform the songs in public for the first time. (“I found a knot of people entranced by Téa Hodzic, a Bosnian singer-guitarist who was performing…an architecture graduate who came to this country as a refugee…her voice haunted me for the rest of the day.” — Clive Davis of The Times)

Kal enshrine the story of Roma and refugees in the Balkans.  Band leader Dragan Ristic fled Milosevic’s Serbia in 1999 — at the time all males of military age were being conscripted to the army so to fight Nato and oppress the Albanian population of Kosovo – and took refuge in Budapest. When Milosevic was overthrown he returned, having already started developing the idea of a band that mixed Balkan Gypsy folk flavours with electronic elements. Kal was built in Belgrade out of their own Roma community and has become a dynamic musical and political outfit that aims to speak for the Roma people of former Yugoslavia.

Patrick Neate will be hosting BookSlam @ Celebrating Sanctuary in the amazing yurt. For over a decade Whitbread award winner Patrick Neate’s novels (Twelve Bar Blues, City of Tiny Lights etc) have been dazzling us. And he’s also invented London’s coolest most sexually cerebral club night — BookSlam. His latest novel, Jerusalem, is just about to hit the shelves and he’s tipped us the literary wink that identity, flight and refuge swirl within its covers. 

Bea Green was liberated from a terrible fate on the Kindertransport trains that brought children of Jewish and other families at threat from the Nazis to England, 70 years ago, just before the outbreak of World War 2. In the BookSlam tent, she will tell us how it was for a 14 year old German-speaking Jew to arrive on these shores back then … and how it is to be an 84 year old survivor today. Also in the BookSlam @ Celebrating Sanctuary Yurt: Chris Cleave, whose novel about Nigerian refugee Little Bee, The Other Hand, has achieved international acclaim and been shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize, and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, one of the UK’s most celebrated columnists and a refugee herself from Uganda in the 1970’s, who will be reading from her new book The Settler’s Cookbook, a memoir of love, migration and food.

Celebrating Sanctuary is part of Refugee Week (15 – 21 June) and the Coin Street Festival.

2 — 7pm Bernie Spain Gardens, Upper Ground, South Bank, London SE1 (next to Oxo Tower Wharf), train/tube: Blackfriars, Southwark, Waterloo
ADMISSION FREE

http://www.myspace.com/celebratingsanctuary