Gibraltar Literary Festival 2019

Join Ann for a strongly interactive event cracking codes set by the main character of her book CODE BREAKER, listening to THE DRAGON’S TALE, (a story set to music, featuring the dragon from the legend about Saint George), hearing about the life of an author and much more, including a bit of body percussion!

Recommended for children ages 7 - 12

Children must be accomapnied by an adult with a valid ticket.

For Dr. Guy Leschziner’s patients, there is no rest for the weary in mind and body. Insomnia, narcolepsy, night terrors, apnea, and sleepwalking are just a sampling of conditions afflicting sufferers who cannot sleep—and their experiences in trying are the stuff of nightmares. Demoniac hallucinations frighten people into paralysis. Restless legs rock both the sleepless and their sleeping partners with unpredictable and uncontrollable kicking. Out-of-sync circadian rhythms confuse the natural body clock’s days and nights.

Then there are the extreme cases. A woman in a state of deep sleep who gets dressed, unlocks her car, and drives for several miles before returning to bed. The man who has spent decades cleaning out kitchens while “sleep-eating.” The teenager prone to the serious, yet unfortunately nicknamed Sleeping Beauty Syndrome stuck in a cycle of excessive unconsciousness, binge eating, and uncharacteristic displays of aggression and hypersexuality while awake.

In this talk, Dr Leschziner will show how many of these sleep disorders are as a result of abnormalities of the brain, and what implications these extreme sleep problems have for us all.

Dotted across homes in Britain are people who were witnesses to one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. Yet their memory of India's Partition in 1947 has been shrouded in silence.

Kavita Puri ‘s father was twelve when he found himself one of the millions of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims caught up in the devastating aftermath of a hastily drawn border, dividing the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan. He remained silent – like so many – about the horrors he had seen for seventy years.

When her father finally spoke out, opening up a forgotten part of Puri's family history, she was compelled to seek out the stories of South Asians who were once subjects of the British Raj, and are now British citizens. Determined to preserve these accounts – of the end of empire and the difficult birth of two nations – Puri records a series of remarkable first-hand testimonies. They reveal Partition's enduring legacy for British South Asians and their descendants in Britain today.