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"TV Book Club" author Roma Tearne will be mingling with customers at Blackwell's flagship store in Oxford next week when she becomes the chain's first writer in residence.
The HarperPress author will blog about the historic Broad Street shop's everyday business on the book chain's website and at www.fifthestate.co.uk. The publisher said Tearne will "produce leaflets for the counters in store, sketched caricatures of people she meets and, at the end of the residency, create a special publication for the bookshop". Tearne will also be holding a "general reading election" where customers can vote for their favourite book.
The author will be at the bookshop from 26th April. On 29th April, she will be in conversation with novelist Ali Shaw, whose début novel, The Girl With Glass Feet, has been shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize.
Tearne's new novel, The Swimmer, is published on 4th May. Her latest book, Brixton Beach, was a selected title on Channel 4's "TV Book Club" earlier this year.
Store manager Zool Verjee said: "Anyone expecting an author just sitting in a bookshop, looking hopefully at passersby, and wondering if anyone will engage them in conversation will have their expectations confounded. This is a residency full of intrigue and creative joie de vivre."
"The residency will take the form of an investigation into what it really is like to work with, and surrounded by, books," Tearne said.
"Books are magical things, material objects, receptacles of imagination and ideas, information and touchstones of feeling. While this is not an anti e-book event, it would be fair to call it a pro-book celebration," she added.