Swansea lecturer's Sleepwalkers' Ball
A lecturer from the American Studies department at Swansea University is to have his first novel, a surreal fantasy, entitled The Sleepwalkers' Ball published this May.
Dr Alan Bilton is a specialist in modernism, silent cinema, Freud and Literature. Drawing on silent film slapstick and surreal fantasy, The Sleepwalkers' Ball is described by the publisher, Alcemi, as 'a cross between Mary Poppins and Kafka' and is a poignant tale of love lost and found as a man and a woman race against time to find each other in a strangely black and white Scottish cityscape.
Dr Bilton said: "The melancholy setting of the Scottish town made me think of it as a book in black and white, and from there it just seemed a short hop to recasting the book as a sort of silent film- the cartoon-like or grotesque characters, the dreamlike apparitions and sudden shifts in time and space, the way in which it occupied a strange sort of position between comedy and terror - all these took me back to the silent movies I'd loved as a kid."
The Sleepwalkers' Ball was officially be launched on April 29th 2009 at the smallest cinema in Wales, La Charrette at the Gower Heritage Centre, Park Mill. Readings from the book were be accompanied by two silent Buster Keaton films: The High Sign and Sherlock Junior.
For further information about the School of Humanities, visit: http://www.swan.ac.uk/humanities/