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Growing Up and Getting Out: Karen Campbell, Tom Newlands & Juano Diaz

27 Apr 2025 - 19:30

Growing Up and Getting Out: Karen Campbell, Tom Newlands & Juano Diaz

For fans of Shuggie Bain and The Young Team, we welcome three Scottish writers whose books deal with the hardships of growing up in tough circumstances and finding ways to escape to a better life. Karen Campbell’s life-affirming new novel, This Bright Life, depicts a young boy navigating a life in foster care, alongside the narrative of the woman who inadvertently put him there. Tom Newlands’ Only Here, Only Now portrays a teenage girl growing up in post-industrial Fife, whose ADHD provides her with a unique and eye-opening perspective on her drab environment. Juano Diaz’s memoir, Slum Boy, reimagines his own upbringing in Glasgow tenements in the late 70’s, filled with the debris of his mother’s alcoholism and poverty, before being adopted into a Roma family in the countryside.   Join these authors in conversation with fellow writer Brian Conaghan, as they discuss emerging from life’s challenges, and whether the past must dictate the future.   

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