Word and musicmeet at festival

Founded by poet and publisher Nicholas Johnson, the festival is in its third year and has become an established event on the local arts calender.

Festival highlights include performances by Scottish folk musician Alasdair Roberts and Gaelic poet Meg Bateman.

Alasdair has released a number of acclaimed solo albums and is a member of the English/Scottish quartet The Furrow Collective.

Helen Macdonald will be talking about her best selling book H is for Hawk - a poetic appraisal of the life of a falconer’s life and her connection with the hawk Mabel, who she bought on a Scottish quayside for £800 and decided to train.

Half the Black Huts line up is Scottish, but French poetry is also a feature, as both poets Manson and McGuiness are translators from Mallarme, and Old Town resident Tymon Dogg plays an array of instruments at a Surrealist performance on Sunday afternoon.

Glasgow poets Peter Manson and Tom Leonard read at The Electric Palace. Tom Pickard, who has collaborated with Liane Carrol and fine tuned a Paul McCartney liberetto, shows a documentary film on poet and jazz pianist Roy Fisher and reads from Hoyoot.

Way of the Morris film makers Rob Curry and Tim Plester will be filming Hastings’ seminal folk singer Shirley Collins in Old Town, while also introducing a new short bucolic film.

The festival closes on Sunday with an evening with film director John Krish. Aged 19, he co edited Humphrey Jennings´Listen to Britain in 1942.

Joining British Transport Films, he made the classic The Elephant Will Never Forget, a beautiful film about London’s last tram journey.

Krish will be at the Electric Palace Cinema to introduce his rare film Captured.

Made for Military Intelligence, the unflinching 1959 docu-drama shows what it was like to be a prisoner of war of the North Koreans in the 1950 - 1953 War. It was marked as ‘restricted’ and only shown to selected members of the Services until 2004.

The festival takes place at venues in Hastings including The Beacon and The Electric Palace.

For the full programme and ticket details, email www.e-truscan.co.uk or call 07905 082 421.