Anne-Marie will be participating in a special poetry reading to coincide with the London Olympics:

Actors and writers join in poetry project at Dunstanburgh Castle

THE voices of some of Britain's best-known actors and writers will resound around a ruined castle in Northumberland this summer for a cultural event linked to the London Olympics.

The Peace Camp project at Dunstanburgh Castle will see love poetry suggested by members of the public performed over a specially-commissioned music soundtrack from dusk to dawn on July 19-22.

Actors Anne-Marie Duff, Jane Horrocks, Alun Armstrong and Jonathan Pryce will be among those reading poems, along with poets Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion and novelist Edna O’Brien.

The project has been put together by director Deborah Warner and actress Fiona Shaw, best-known as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films.

They appealed to the public to submit love poems to be read out at eight coastal locations around the British Isles, including Dunstanburgh. Among those submitting poems were people who visited Barter Books in Alnwick to meet Fiona Shaw.

The project is inspired by the little known tradition of the Olympic truce, when the United Nations calls on all warring nations to lay down their arms for the duration of the Olympic Games.

Ms Shaw said: “These islands have a strong tradition of poetry, of capturing human experiences with words.

“In moments of true love or painful parting, all that’s unimportant falls away and language is laid bare. We quote poets in times of need, borrowing their fragments of feelings.”

As well as Dunstanburgh, the project will take place at Cemaes Bay in Anglesey, White Park Bay on the North Antrim Coast, Mussenden Temple and Downhill Beach in Northern Ireland, Cliff Beach on the Isle of Lewis, Fort Fiddes in Aberdeenshire, Cuckmere Haven in Sussex and Godrevy in Cornwall.

Arts company Artichoke, which put on the Lumiere festival in Durham is staging the event. A schools project will run alongside Peace Camp designed to engage young people in the discussions about the poetic language of love.

In Northumberland, artists Bethan Maddocks and Verity Quinn and poet Ira Lightman, are working with pupils at the Duchess’s Community High School in Alnwick to make a poetry-filled tent installation to go on display in London.

For more on Peace Camp see Culture magazine, free in Tuesday's Journal.