Hip-lit in the East End

LEGIONS of writers are swarming to creative crucibles in Bethnal Green, Hackney Wick, Shoreditch and Spitalfields for this year's annual London Word Festival.

Hip-lit connoisseurs will revel in the extensive line up, and there will also be a feast of new literature, poetry, comedy, and even sitar music.

The crowd will be young, sharp and restless as under-30 heavyweights Ross Raisin and Joe Dunthorne jostle for attention alongside comics Phill Jupitus and Hackney's Iain Sinclair.

Renaissance man Phill Jupitus and East End scribbler Tim Wells will have a comfy 'evening in' on the sofa at Bethnal Green Working Men's Club on Monday where they will open up their Aladdin's cave of vinyl rarities and escort audience on a trip down memory lane with a knees up featuring an assortment of soul, ska and rocksteady from Jackie Wilson to Ian Dury.

Convening a troupe of London's brightest young writers, Shakespeare in Shoreditch will pitch up for a night at the north end of Curtain Road on Wednesday, a stone's throw from where the ruins of the Bard's original theatre are believed to have been found.

Five authors perform their specially prepared work on stage, with a projected live-drawing accompaniment by Mustashrik, illustrator of the Manga version of Julius Caesar.

Publishing sensation Joe Dunthorne debuts his version of The Tragedy of King Lear. While poet Siddharta Bose takes Othello off the shelf to reinvent the 'outsider's perspective', and Lee Rourke revisits the gravedigger scene in Hamlet

Cult author, poet and documentary filmmaker Iain Sinclair will hold a one-of-its-kind, site-specific performance in Hackney's oldest and most mysterious structure - the partial remains of the medieval parish church of St Augustine's.

Sinclair will draw on his hotly-anticipated book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire to uncover an alternative history of the borough on March 21.

The London Word Festival starts today and will run until March 25.

For more info, see www.londonwordfestival.com