Cheltenham Literature Festival

Isn't it time for Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko to climb off the political swing he seems to be always riding? No wonder he often felt confused and insecure.

I could see this frustration clearly when interviewing him at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 1995. i knew many of his poems including a picture of childhood by heart written in nineteen sixty three when if toshenko was in his thirties it described an episode in the market of a small siberian town deep in the soviet rear during the second world war a hungry youth tried to steal some wedges from an open-air stall in a market square the holders of that and other stalls caught him and started beating him mercilessly with boots and metal bars with ingenuity, with relish, with weighty righteousness.

In vain did the victim whisper, Brothers, what for? that only added to the crowd's sadistic rage the crowd was deafened and enraged they grumbled at those who weren't hitting the thief hard enough they trampled his body in the dirty spring snow in the middle of that collective execution one sweaty stall owner turned to iftushenko then just a ten-year-old and shouted come on kid hit him too but i as a boy burst out crying with shame instead if toshenka wrote before ending the poem with the following rhymed in the original three-liner and if a hundred

howling wildly

Isn't it time for Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko to climb off the political swing he seems to be always riding? No wonder he often felt confused and insecure.

I could see this frustration clearly when interviewing him at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 1995. i knew many of his poems including a picture of childhood by heart written in nineteen sixty three when iftushenko was in his thirties it described an episode in the market of a small siberian town deep in the soviet rear during the second world war a hungry youth tried to steal some wedges from an open-air stall in a market square the holders of that and other stalls caught him and started beating him mercilessly with boots and metal bars with ingenuity, with relish, with weighty righteousness.

In vain did the victim whisper, Brothers, what for? that only added to the crowd's sadistic rage the crowd was deafened and enraged they grumbled at those who weren't hitting the thief hard enough they trampled his body in the dirty spring snow in the middle of that collective execution one sweaty stall owner turned to iftushemko then just a ten-year-old and shouted come on kid hit him too

but i

The

other news is that Candice Carty-Williams, the author, has withdrawn as a guest curator and participant from the 2026 Cheltenham Literature Festival.

in August 2026, that's this most recently, because it was being sponsored by the Times news source, suggesting that they ought to have made more comment on the death of Professor Jason Arday, given that they had made much comment in the lead up to his death.

And they ought to have sort of done a post hoc possible self-examination of the maybe disproportionate coverage of his public shaming.