Mary Kenny - author and journalist

Mary Kenny is an author, journalist and broadcaster. She has a special interest in the relationship between England and Ireland, which she explored in her biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, Germany Calling, and more specifically in her play Allegiance, which was premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2006. Starring Mel Smith as Winston Churchill and Michael Fassbender as Michael Collins – and directed by Brian Gilbert - it had worldwide headlines when Mel Smith threatened to smoke the Churchillian cigar on stage in defiance of stern Scottish anti-smoking regulations. It was widely acclaimed by the London and Edinburgh critics, and a London production is planned for March 2008. A revised version of the text of Allegiance has been published by New Island Books.

Mary is currently working on Crown and Shamrock, a study of the relations between the British monarchy and the Irish people, from Queen Victoria to Prince William, to be published in 2008.

Mary's website is at: www.mary-kenny.com/

Tanja Howarth

Tanja Howarth from the Tanja Howarth Literary Agency specialises in general fiction and non-fiction, thrillers, contemporary and historical novels. Until recently she represented A.L.Kennedy, whose latest novel Day won the 2007 Costa Book of the Year Prize. Tanja is also a specialist in handling German translation rights, and was responsible for bringing Patrick Suskind's novel Perfume to the UK.

Pip Piacentino

Pasquale ‘Pip’ Piacentino was born in May 1938 on Staten Island, New York. He first appeared on stage in New York when his father brought the three-year old Pip on stage to liven up his act. Pip subsequently trained as a professional child actor with Ornato Studios, New York and more recently studied playwriting for two years at Morley College. He has acted, directed and held senior management positions in amateur theatre since the 1970s and has run innovative workshops at home and abroad.

Pip’s playwrighting credits include: The Writer‘s Strings, Pinocchio (with Tina Massey), Poppa Called, Odds Win Out, Dining Decisions and A Quiet Place. He has conducted many seminars and workshops, including
drama workshops for The Women’s Institute in Kent; a series of seven group drama skills Workshops for Deal Drama Society’s Youth Group, and conducted “Sharing the Stage” workshops for South London Theatre, Battersea Players, New Deal Theatre Company and Guild Players Deal.

Pip says he fell in love with Britain when he was stationed here with US Navy in the 1960s and decided to make it his home. His links with Kent, especially Deal, stretch back to 1964. He is equally at home as an actor, director and playwright. Pip is a keen traveller abroad, enjoys visiting foreign theatre companies and bonding with elephants.

Click HERE to read Pip’s full CV.

Martin Lloyd

Way back last century, people who should have known better, bullied Martin into giving lectures on the history of the passport. Audiences not only asked for more but insisted that he write the book. Having spent over twenty years stamping passports for HM Government, he was appalled by the lack of interest shown by those whose tasks required them to handle the documents. So after years of research, he wrote THE PASSPORT – THE HISTORY OF MAN’S MOST TRAVELLED DOCUMENT, published by Sutton Publishing in 2003 and selling worldwide in hardback and paperback.

But the audiences at his talks kept demanding books. Despite his protesting that his cycling exploits were of no interest to anybody including himself, THE TROUBLE WITH FRANCE was published in 2004 (reprinted in 2005 and 2006) and the sequel, THE TROUBLE WITH SPAIN, was thumbscrewed out of him in 2005 and has probably torpedoed forever his chances of free board and lodging with his friends in Bilbao.Martin came to national notice when on BBC Radio 4’s Midweek programme he enthralled listeners with his accounts of the history of the passport whilst comfortably patching over the hole left by an absent programme guest, much to the relief of the presenter – after all, this was live radio!

He has since broadcast many times on radio and television and is much in demand as a public speaker.

Jane Wenham-Jones

Some writers are shy, retiring creatures who like nothing better than to remain in their dusty attics hunched over their latest masterpiece shunning the limelight.

Forced to come blinking into the daylight and real, commercial world, they mumble in self-effacing fashion when interviewed about their literary endeavours and scuttle back to their desks the moment that nasty centre-of-attention stuff is over.

Jane Wenham-Jones is not one of those.

For Jane, writing the books is the grim, time-consuming, frustrating, drink-too-much-and-pull-your-hair-out part of the proceedings. The lovely bit is when it's all over, you've been hugging the final, finished, published copy all day and you can get out there and start talking about it.

Jane’s new book Wannabe a Writer offers tips on how you too can overcome writer’s bottom, get your work published and get out there and talk about it. Wannabe a writer? Why not take a look at www.wannabeawriter.co.uk for a taster . . .

Richard Henley

Richard Henley was our guest speaker on 5th April 2007.

He separated fact from the fiction of TV detectives, and offered us some hints on making our own crime writing more realistic.

Richard is a retired policeman who has been involved in investigating numerous serious crimes – many of them headline cases, including the Deal Bombing. He specialised in scene of crime investigation using the Three

Fs – Forensics, Fingerprints and Photography. He left the police as a sergeant in 1997, after 30 years’ service.

Richard and his wife live in Nonington. He is a father and a grandfather and a member of ‘The Monday Club’ – a group of retired men who meet on a Friday (obviously!) to do Good Work and then put the world rights over a pint or two in the pub.

David Donachie

David Donachie claims to have had more jobs than birthdays. He now writes full time and lives in Deal with his wife and two children. He was our guest speaker on 1st February 2007

David's main area of work is in 18th century naval fiction, in which he blends seagoing adventure and whodunit story lines. He has written sixteen novels and is in the process of writing his seventeenth. Writing as Tom Connery, he is also the author of the popular Markham of the Marines novels. More recently, he wrote a vivid biographical trilogy on the love affair between Lord Horatio Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton.

Denis Hart

Denis Hart is the Editor of the quarterly glossy magazine Deal Today. Denis was our guest speaker on 4th January 2007, when he spoke about the production of the magazine and the type of articles magazine editors are always on the look-out for.

Peter Hunt

Professor Peter Hunt was our guest speaker on 7th December 2006. Peter was the first specialist in Children’s Literature to be appointed full Professor of English in a British University. He has written or edited around twenty books, together with over two hundred articles and one hundred and fifty reviews. He has also published four novels for young adults.

Peter has lectured in over one hundred and twenty universities in twenty countries. He has been the Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, MIT, Simmons College, Boston and San Diego State University as well as in Australia and New Zealand. The International Society for the Fantastic in the Arts presented him with their Distinguished Scholarship Award in 1995 and he won the Brothers Grimm Award for the services to children’s literature.

Apart from the many books, he has adapted Posy Simmonds’s Fred as a musical for primary school children for the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and has written the annual pantomime for the village he lives in, five times.