Few literature festivals excite me these days. They have become so formulaic; such blatant PR exercises for the publishing industry. Each has at least three “celebrity” chefs signing their latest overhyped, undercooked cookbooks. Each has some sort of “cutting-edge” discussion about the morality of the Iraq war, involving chattering eggheads you vaguely recognise from Newsnight Review. Each has politicians trying to flog mind-numbing memoirs. The prevailing ethos is so middle-class, middle-aged and middle-England. Nothing wrong with that, of course – except that it’s exactly what you would expect a lit-fest to be like. Nothing startles. Nothing ruffles the genteel conviviality.

Having said which, here’s a paean of praise for another literature festival! But this one, I hope, is different. It’s called the London Word Festival, runs for three weeks from next Friday, and is based at eight East End venues that would make a good book in themselves – such grungily atmospheric delights as the Hoxton Hall, a rundown music-hall, and the George Tavern in Commercial Road with its ravishing Victorian decor and (if you are lucky) Kate Moss on a sofa.

The venues suit the material. You won’t find superannuated politicians or puffed-up chefs here. Instead the festival celebrates “Generation Txt”: the twentysomething poets, novelists and playwrights who draw as much inspiration from the gritty realities and illicit joys of the modern city as Wordsworth did from daffodils or Herman Melville from whales. In one typical gathering, for instance, the 22-year-old Richard Milward will be reading from Apples, his brilliantly gross transposition of the Adam-and-Eve story to a Middlesbrough housing estate; while the young American author Joshua Ferris offers an extract from his savage satire of office life in Chicago, Then We Came to the End.

There are nights devoted to rap-inspired verse (the stunning New York poet Saul Williams appears), and others celebrating blogging and texting as literary forms. And if that thought turns you purple with rage, you are probably not quite the target audience. There’s also an evening of “Vaudevillian cabaret, apocalyptic blues and surreal poetics”, and another devoted to exploring “univocalism” – the art of writing poetry using only one vowel. As in: Lot of old tosh, not worth stopping to scoff.

Two things appeal. The first is that this is a festival bold enough to place writers on the same bill as comedians, rappers and jazzers, and confident enough to expect those writers to be just as entertaining. And the second is that the very existence of a lit-fest run by and for people under 35 refutes the notion that the well-crafted written word is dead, or at least withering into terminal paralysis in a world dominated by blaring images and thudding rock beats.

What’s clear is that both fiction and poetry are undergoing a renaissance among the young. But it’s a renaissance rooted in clubs and the internet, rather than in staid publishing conglomerates. That’s great. London has always been a magnet for larger-than-life literary luminaries. I could easily imagine Dickens, Addison or Dr Johnson doing a brilliant “set” at the London Word Festival. Generation Txt is just redefining that rumbustious tradition for our age.

Find out who are the London Word Festival's top literary stars of 2008

www.londonword-festival.com

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