Marlborough literature festival - 29 September- 2 October 2022
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Marlborough
marlborough
literature
festival
29 September–
2 October 2022
Lead Sponsor
S p o n s o rs & Fr i e n d s o f L i t Fe s t We lco m e
How to b ook ti ckets
Marlborough Literature Festival is Opticians, Marlborough Library, St We could not run LitFest without We are delighted to return to a Primary School to kick us off Priority booking for Friends from 4 July
supported by lead sponsor Sarah John’s Academy, Waitrose, Gazette our loyal volunteers who donate full programme of live events on Thursday morning, pop-up LitFest Box Office from 14 July
Graphics: Raven, main event sponsor Hiscox & Herald, BBC Radio Wiltshire and their time to make the festival a for the first time since our tenth storytelling around the town on
Aly Storey 07787 500590 Insurance and event sponsors Wiltshire Life; and to Sir Simon success. If you are interested in anniversary in 2019, so the High Saturday afternoon and the results
On our website: marlboroughlitfest.org
Print: (no booking fee, postage charged at £2.00 if required)
Thoroughbred Design
William Golding Ltd, Robert Hiscox, Russell Beale, our patron. getting involved please contact us at Street should be buzzing again. of our Love Books and children’s
& Print 01460 240773 Adam Matthew Digital, St Francis general@marlboroughlitfest.org. competitions over the weekend. By telephone: 0333 666 3366
Website: School, Marlborough College, Thank you too to our Golden Our community outreach remains Mon – Sat 9am – 5pm (through TicketSource £2.00
Ghost (Digital) Limited
www.ghostlimited.com marlborough.news, Hamilton Trust Friends Susie Fisher and Philip The White Horse Bookshop is our an important part of LitFest. We look forward to seeing you for telephone booking fee applies plus postage if
Photography: and Katharine House Gallery. and Tanya Cayford and to our bookselling partner for LitFest. Look out for a song performed Marlborough LitFest 2022. required)
Ben Phillips
anonymous donors and our new Many thanks to Angus MacLennan by Marlborough St Mary’s CE The LitFest Team
www.bphillips.co.uk In person: The White Horse Bookshop,
PR: We are also very grateful to the Friends of LitFest. Please see and his team for all their work over
Fran Del Mar Marlborough, Mon – Sat 9am – 5.30pm,
following for their generous support: marlboroughlitfest.org for more the festival weekend and support
07950 558683 Sun 11am – 4pm and from the Box Office in the
Fingal-Rock Wines, Haine & Smith about how you can support LitFest. during the year.
Marlborough LitFest
Town Hall over the festival weekend from 6.30pm
Registered Charity Fri 30 September. Please note that the bookshop
No.1149252 cannot take orders by telephone.
Registered Company
No. 07070372 We do not automatically exchange or refund tickets. If we have to cancel
Photo: Ben Phillips Photography
an event, we will refund ticketholders. Details in the brochure are correct
at the time of going to print. However, LitFest reserves the right to make
changes in the event of unforeseen circumstances. Please keep an eye
on our website at marlboroughlitfest.org for updates or contact us at
general@marlboroughlitfest.org if you have any queries.
All events will run for approximately one hour unless stated otherwise.
We welcome visitors with disabilities and our stewards will be able to
direct you to step-free access and seat you in a suitable place. Children
under the age of 14 must be accompanied by an adult for all events.
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Hannah Lowe Ali Smith
Po e t r y The Golding Speaker
This is not just a an English mother and a Jamaican Five into four into his house to look after his dog.
book of poems about Chinese father), Lowe is fearless in her won’t go. Or An old school acquaintance gets
school. Hannah Lowe examination of some key issues of our will it? Hot in touch and soon invades Sand’s
has mined her decade age. She is also fearless in her take on the heels home, with teenage twins in tow,
spent teaching at an on poetry, turning the formal sonnet of her multi- boisterous and annoying in equal
inner-city London sixth into a conversational, contemporary award-winning measure. What’s more, despite
form to bear witness form that buzzes with wit and joy. Seasonal displaying obvious Covid symptoms,
to her pupils – Quartet of they are anti-vaxxers to the core.
The Kids – with Lowe is an award-winning poet and Autumn, Winter, Unwelcome though her visitor
warmth and respect a lecturer in creative writing at Spring and is, the two women swap stories,
and to interrogate the Brunel University. She read from her Summer, Ali bringing to life an entirely new
universal experience of what it is family memoir Long Time No See on Smith brings us a fifth element, drama – one of a medieval female
to be taught and to teach. She has BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week in the aptly titled Companion Piece. blacksmith, a lock bedecked with
also mined her own life – as child, 2015. The Kids is Like its predecessors, the novel is wrought-iron ivy leaves and an
student and mother – to ask some her third poetry set very much in the present: Covid ancient, mysteriously reconstructed
fundamental questions about human collection. has the nation in its grip and life is clock.
connection and purpose. Shortlisted for lived in lockdown; raw sewage is
the 2021 Memorial Hall discharged into rivers; and laughing Confused? Then come along and let
Marlborough College Town Hall
Nothing is out of bounds – class, TS Eliot Prize, policemen take photos of victims of Smith, one of the nation’s foremost £12
£10
gender, race, death, sex and smoking it was named crime. storytellers and wordsmiths, Friday 30 September
Thursday 29 September
Photo: Lealle
– it is all there in these energetic and Costa Book of enlighten you. 7.30pm
7.30pm
empathetic poems. Of mixed race the Year 2021. At the heart of the story is Sand, an
herself (Lowe was born in Ilford to artist whose father is ill. She moves
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J o B ro w n i n g W ro e G i le s W h i t t e l l
A Te r r i b le K i n d n e s s T h e G re a t e st R a i d
Debut novelist Jo Browning Wroe What happens during those It’s gone down in history as the account that draws on official
is nothing if not meticulous: as few traumatic days will haunt most daring British commando documents, interviews and the
part of her research into A Terrible William for the rest of the novel, raid of World War II. In March 1942, astonished reactions of German
Kindness, she spent time studying leaching into his relationships when Britain’s morale was low, soldiers. And who better to tell this
the work of an embalmer. “I knew I with his girlfriend and his mother Winston Churchill approved what remarkable story?
had to because of that thing about and unlocking memories of his many considered to be a suicide
writing,” she said in an interview in childhood and his father’s death. mission: an attack on a German Author of the bestselling Bridge
The Guardian.“You have to know the Yet beneath the tragedy, both public U-boat base at St Nazaire in of Spies, Whittell has an ear for
smells, the sounds.” and personal, there is warmth and France. The audacious plan, known human detail and a lyrical way with
the redemptive power of song. as Operation Chariot, was for words. For 25 years he was at The
And what dreadful smells and For while William’s boyhood days HMS Campbeltown, an old British Times, working first as the paper’s
sounds the protagonist of her as a chorister may have brought destroyer packed with 8500 pounds Moscow correspondent, then as its
novel, 19-year-old newly qualified heartache, the choral music that of timed explosives, to be rammed Washington bureau chief, before
undertaker William Lavery, has stayed with him also has the into the huge dock gates. Would becoming chief leader writer. He is
encounters. It is October 1966, and power to uplift. it succeed? Five Victoria Crosses now an editor at Tortoise Media.
he has just arrived in Aberfan in were subsequently awarded – more
the aftermath of the catastrophic Browning Wroe will also be than in any similar operation. “A compelling page-turner, the
St Mary’s Church Hall collapse of the colliery spoil tip that giving a talk at the Jubilee Centre work of a master storyteller,” Town Hall
£10 engulfed the Welsh village, claiming in Marlborough as part of our Eighty years on, journalist and according to journalist Matthew £10
Photo: Tom Pilston
Saturday 1 October the lives of 144 people, most of programme of free community author Giles Whittell recreates d’Ancona. “Enthralling,” agrees Saturday 1 October
10am them children. outreach events. the events of that extraordinary The Mail on Sunday. 10am
night in The Greatest Raid,
a breath-taking, cinematic
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Hannah Bourne-Taylor Kamila Shamsie
F le d g l i n g B e st o f Fr i e n d s
“I hope this book gives little doses life’s focus, living in her hand Growing up in a household of reach that delves into the minds
of joy and glimmers of hope,” for three months, nesting in her intellectuals in Karachi in the of her characters and pinpoints
Hannah Bourne-Taylor says of her hair and renewing her sense of 1970s, Kamila Shamsie lived contemporary mores.
debut memoir, which tells the story connection to the world. between two worlds, “the world
of how she rescued and hand- around me and the world of Shamsie’s new novel, Best of
reared two wild birds in Ghana. Bourne-Taylor went on imagination.” At home, her mother Friends, promises another timely
“It’s a little story with a big heart.” to rescue a swift too, ordered books from London, and tale about power and love. It traces
releasing both birds her grandfather, who had studied the story of two friends, Zahra
In 2013, Bourne-Taylor moved to back into the wild. Her classics at Oxford, declaimed and Maryam, from their teenage
Ghana for her husband’s work. She precisely observed tale Greek at the dinner table. Outside, years in Karachi in the 1980s to
found herself ‘a trailing spouse’, is both a moving tribute history (the legacy of the Partition their adult lives in contemporary
without a job or purpose of her to the healing power of India) and politics (the rise London. When unwelcome
own, homesick and depressed. of nature and a plea to of radical Islam) “were never ghosts from their shared past
Then one day protect the wild. separate from lived experience,” re-emerge, their bond is tested
she rescued as Shamsie recalled in a 2018 beyond recognition, “as though the
a mannikin Bourne-Taylor now lives interview. forty years of friendship between
finch that had in Oxfordshire with her them was just a lesson in the
Photo: Alex Von Tunzelman
St. Mary’s Church Hall fallen out of its three ‘birds’ – her husband Robin Today she lives in London, unknowability of other people.” Town Hall
£10 nest and been and two Ghanaian rescue dogs, but continues to explore the £10
Saturday 1 October abandoned Shoebill and Loon. She watches relationship of state and citizen. Hailed as a fiction highlight for Saturday 1 October
11.30am by its flock. migrating swifts from her garden Her six acclaimed and award- 2022, Best of Friends is sure to 11.30am
Photo: xxx
The tiny bird and is working on her second book, winning novels span continents be a talking point of this year’s
became her on British wildlife and conservation. and centuries, with an imaginative LitFest.
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A n d rew M i l le r A d a m N i co l s o n
T h e S lo w w o r m ’s S o n g L i fe B e t w e e n t h e T i d e s
Ever since Ingenious Pain, his Like so many of the best books, Life chapter on the Greek philosopher
dazzling debut, was published Between the Tides: In Search of Rock Heraclitus.
in 1997, Andrew Miller has been Pools and Other Adventures Along
revered as an exquisite writer The Shore is and is not about its The dizzying shifts in perspective
of lambent prose. He has won apparent subject. Adam Nicolson are as lyrical as they are scientific.
numerous awards and been is a prize-winning author of books There is a new fact on every page,
compared to Hilary Mantel for the on landscape, place, literature underpinned by a philosopher’s
way in which he breathes new life doormat. It’s a summons to an and history. To these plaudits add desire to understand the individual’s
into the past with quiet intensity. inquiry into an incident from his acclaimed nature writer: his last place in a vast and shifting world.
His sixth novel, Pure, was the Costa military past. Should he testify and book, The Seabird’s Cry, soared “Life is tidal, full of loss and arrival,
Book of the Year in 2011, and his jeopardise his relationship with a among the cliffs and oceans. This a thing that makes and ebbs,”
eighth, Now We Shall Be Entirely daughter he barely knows? Instead, time, he digs rockpools on the Nicolson writes.
Free, won the Highland Book Prize he decides to write her an account shore of Argyllshire near the family
in 2018. of his life – part defence, part love home of his wife, Sarah Raven, to The Guardian critic Alex Preston
letter. explore the intertidal world. declared: “Spending time in
His latest novel, The Slowworm’s Nicolson’s rock pool will change
Song, takes the form of a “It’s all real, and all fictional, Nicolson’s focus is at once minute your life and the way you view the
Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith
St Mary’s Church Hall confessional letter and examines gorgeously so,” says The Guardian. and huge: he leaps from studying lives of others.” An opportunity Town Hall
Photo: Penny Tweedie
£10 more recent history: The Troubles “You read what might have been crabs, sandhoppers and winkles not to be missed in landlocked £10
Saturday 1 October in Northern Ireland. Stephen Rose, a perfectly commonplace story to contemplating vast tidal and Wiltshire. Saturday 1 October
1pm ex-soldier and recovering alcoholic, of failure and redemption with rock formations and our human 1pm
is living a quiet life in Somerset your pulse racing, all your senses relationship with the sea over
when an envelope lands on the awake.” millennia, while also throwing in a
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Fo r W r i t e rs B e n e d i c t A l le n
& R e a d e rs E x p lo re r
Memoir Writing Poetry in the Pub
For more than 30 years, Benedict
Allen has travelled to the furthest
BBC TV shows and is also the
author of ten books. In his latest,
Workshop with Join Alex Hickman, writer and reaches of our planet, from the Explorer, he takes stock of his
Cathy Rentzenbrink poet, at The Green Dragon for Amazon to the Arctic. Usually alone, extraordinary career with insight
Why do we want to write and what our popular open mic poetry often in danger and frequently ill or and humour. He examines his quest
stops us? How can we put our own event. All poets of any age are injured, he has survived adversity for adventure and reflects on the
story into words? Bestselling author invited to bring poems about ‘The in some of the world’s most lessons to be learned from his
and creative writing teacher Cathy Environment’ which is the theme Collectable Books inaccessible terrains. He nearly expeditions, particularly from the
Rentzenbrink will help you to tackle for this year’s National Poetry Day Roadshow died nine times and, famously, in indigenous communities among
Photo: Peter Flude
these questions and more in this on 6 October. You can submit your Our local rare book expert Chris 2017, was rescued from Papua New which he has lived.
interactive workshop. Renowned for poems in advance to general@ Gange is once again at Katharine Guinea by The Daily Mail.
her own memoirs, The Last Act of marlboroughlitfest.org and these House Gallery to value and discuss “To me personally,” Allen says,
Love and Dear will be read first. Or just turn up your rare and collectable books. Dubbed “the father of the video “exploration isn’t about planting
Reader, she on the day. Whether you selfie,” Allen has pioneered the use flags, conquering Nature, or going
will draw on Hickman have a first of a hand-held video recorder to take somewhere in order to make a
Photo: Adrian Lourie Writer Pictures
her recently has run edition on us to places previously unknowable mark – it’s about the opposite. It’s
published our Poetry your shelves, and show us the process of about opening yourself up, allowing
Quaker Meeting House handbook Write The Green Dragon in the Pub Katharine House Gallery or just exploration, warts and all. yourself to be vulnerable and letting
£25 Town Hall
Photo: Martin Hartley
It All Down to Saturday 1 October sessions for Saturday 1 October something the place and people make their £10
Saturday 1 October encourage and 5pm several years 11am-2pm out of the Named by The Daily Telegraph as mark on you.”
2pm-4.30pm Saturday 1 October
guide seasoned Tickets not required and blogs Tickets not required ordinary, bring one of only two living Great British 2.30pm
16 places writers and at stuff- it along to find Explorers (the other is Ranulph
first-timers. happens.org. out more. Fiennes), Allen has made numerous
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Tra n s l a t i o n D u e l D o re e n C u n n i n g h a m
G r i m m s’ Fa i r y Ta le s Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whalesician
This amicable sparring between the European Council of Literary What do you do if you are a young,” Cunningham says. “When
two top translators has become a Translators’ Associations. struggling single mother unable I was desperate, they helped me
popular staple of LitFest, so we’re to pay the mortgage? For rewrite our story.”
delighted to be setting up another Ruth Martin has been translating London-based journalist Doreen
duel for your entertainment and German fiction and non-fiction Cunningham the surprising Each move along the way is a
erudition. The choice this time is a books since 2010, by authors answer was to take out a £10,000 stepping stone to rebuilding human
tale from the Brothers Grimm: ranging from Joseph Roth loan, pack up her bags and her relationships. Seeing whales dive
Photo: Michael Jershov
‘The Wolf and the Seven Young and Hannah Arendt to Nino two-year-old son and follow a pod beside their boat, Cunningham
Goats’. Each of our German- Haratischwili, Volker Weidermann of grey whales from the lagoons of observes how they parent and she
language experts will be given the and Chris Kraus. She is a former Mexico to the Alaskan glaciers. finds her own human pod among
story to translate. The ensuing co-chair of the Translators the women and mothers she meets
debate over choice of words, Association. The 10,000-mile journey is full of on the journey.
punctuation and grammar will be danger: the migrating whale cows
given extra spice with a fairy tale Ringmaster Daniel Hahn is a writer, and calves swim in warming seas “Raw and rapturous,”
familiar to many. editor and a leading figure in the among predatory killer whales; the Cunningham’s rollercoaster ride
translation world, having served on humans, travelling in their wake defies categorisation, combining
Shaun Whiteside is an award- the board of English PEN and the by plane, train, bus and boat, ride lyrical nature writing and a
Photo: Joanna Szymkiewicz
St Mary’s Church Halll winning translator from German, Society of Authors. His translation a tide of disapproving looks and climate-change cri de coeur with White Horse Bookshop
Photo: Reynaldo Rivera
£10 French, Italian and Dutch. His most of Phenotypes by Brazilian writer hostile situations. a memoir about motherhood and £10
Saturday 1 October recent translation from German, Paolo Scott was longlisted for this mythology. As one reviewer said, Saturday 1 October
2.30pm Aftermath by Harald Jähner, was year’s International Booker Prize. Why undertake such a journey? jump aboard and “you will be glad 2.30pm
shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Whales “travel to the ends of the you’ve joined her.”
Prize in 2021. He is president of earth for themselves and their
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S p o n s o re d b y
R o b e r t H i s cox
Mike Pitts B o b b y P a l m e r & Ay a n n a L lo y d B a n w o
How to Build Stonehenge H i s cox D e b u t A u t h o rs
A rhetorical question for all you Marlborough readers: Their paths to novel-writing could
who among you did not experience a frisson of warmth, not have been more different. Bobby
pride and excitement when it was decisively revealed Palmer went to school in Hertfordshire
two years ago that the vast sarsens that make up most and has worked as a copywriter and
of the stone circle of Stonehenge came from West a freelance journalist, with articles
Woods, a couple of miles outside Marlborough? including ‘One month as a male
stripper’ and ‘Adventures in Mexican
But knowing where the stones originate (it has long wrestling’. Ayanna Lloyd Banwo grew
been established that the smaller bluestones were up in Port of Spain, Trinidad, moved
transported from the Preseli Hills in south-west Wales) to the UK five years ago and studied
is just one small piece in the jigsaw when it comes creative writing at the University of
to working out how our ancestors created one of the East Anglia. Each has garnered rave
nation’s best-known and best-loved ancient monuments. reviews for their first novel.
When We Were Birds, the novel is also a
Indeed, the first word of the book’s title is key in this Palmer’s Isaac and the Egg is, according to ghost story: the two central characters
enthralling ‘howdunnit’, as archaeologist, journalist and novelist Patrick Gale, “a mad, sad, funny are a gravedigger and a woman who,
all-round sleuth Mike Pitts (author of Digging Up Britain debut” in which a young man walks into so her grandmother tells her, has been
Town Halll and Digging for Richard III, among others) draws on his the woods on the worst morning of his life transformed from a crow to escort the dead St. Mary’s Church Hall
Photo: Reynaldo Rivera
£10 lifelong expertise: How did our Neolithic forebears get and discovers something that will change into the afterlife. Small wonder that the £10
Saturday 1 October the stones, many of which weigh 20 tonnes or more, to everything for ever. All human experience is author revealed in The Observer that the Saturday 1 October
4pm the site? How were the stones cut, shaped and raised? here: love, hope, grief… and baked beans. biggest influence on her writing was the 4pm
How has Stonehenge been restored after centuries of oral storytelling of women in her home: “My
vandalism? Pitts, the Poirot of prehistory, will reveal all… While love looms large in Lloyd Banwo’s grandmother told stories like it was breath.”
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P h i l i p H o a re B i s h o p A n d re w R u m s ey
A l b e r t & t h e W h a le
& R ev d C o l i n H e b e r - Pe rc y
This is an extraordinary book. By According to a prevailing view, In English Grounds: A Pastoral
turns biography, autobiography, the Church of England closed its Journal, Rumsey takes the reader
meditation on art and compendium doors during the recent lockdowns, on an exploration of faith, place
of the natural world, it has left and failed its congregations. In and identity. Focusing on his home
critics struggling for superlatives: conversation, Bishop Andrew in Wiltshire, the book is both an
“Reading this book [I was] like a Rumsey and Revd Colin Heber- affirmation and critique of this
person mesmerised by cosmic Percy will offer an opposing view: country’s Christian heritage. “A
events in the sky” (Laura Cumming, that during the pandemic we marvellous book, lit by faith, love
The Observer); “Readers who witnessed the parish’s revival. and imagination,” according to
prefer their art history to have The ancient parish system – Erica Wagner, former literary
both feet on the ground might written off by many as moribund editor of The Times.
be unmoored; others will be – is arguably in rude health, and
intoxicated” (The Economist); more vital than ever in these Heber-Percy’s lyrical Tales of
“a marvellously varied, vividly unsettling times. a Country Parish draws upon
imaginative, seductively digressive his kaleidoscopic knowledge
adventure” (Rachel Campbell- is no surprise to find another one curiosities. We read of a greyhound, Rumsey and Heber-Percy will of nature, philosophy, poetry
Johnston, The Times). here. But the journey of Albrecht a hare, a bird, a walrus – all not only discuss parish politics, and music, as well as religious
White Horse Bookshop Dürer, the celebrated German drawn or painted by Dürer, all they’ll also talk personally and writings, and interlaces them Town Hall
£10 Given that Hoare is the undisputed Renaissance artist at the centre of brought to life by Hoare. Throw in candidly about their experiences with amusing vignettes from his £10
Saturday 1 October champion of all things cetacean – the book, in search of a beached Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, David during the pandemic. And they Wiltshire parish. Simon Russell Saturday 1 October
4pm previous works include Leviathan whale in Zeeland in 1520, is just Bowie and a medley of angels and will each read from their recent, Beale, the LitFest’s patron no less, 5.30pm
or, The Whale and The Whale: In one of myriad animal stories that demons and you will find yourself bestselling books. There might hails it “a delightful book from a
Search of the Giants of the Sea – it make up this literary cabinet of adrift on a sea of wonder. even be songs. gentle, generous spirit.”
1 8 marlboroughlitfest.org Box Office 0333 6663366 1 9Abir Mukherjee P a m Ay re s
The Shadows of Men W h o A re Yo u C a l l i n g Ve r m i n ?
The Scottish Bengali author Abir Pam Ayres’ new book Who Are You was the UK’s bestselling poetry
Mukherjee has quickly established Calling Vermin? combines her sense book of 2021, and some from her
himself as one of our most of humour with her lifelong love earlier work.
entertaining and popular writers and knowledge of the countryside,
of historical crime fiction. His and those who live in it. The rural Pam Ayres has been a writer,
Calcutta series, featuring Captain idyll it isn’t. Here, various factions, broadcaster and entertainer for
Sam Wyndham and the inimitable both human and animal, express over 40 years. She is the author of
Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee their grievances about their current several bestselling poetry books,
(“Surrender-not” to his British lot in life, from the fishermen who including The Works, Surgically
superiors), has won awards, rave can’t afford to live in their own Enhanced, You Made Me Late Again!
reviews and loyal readers for its communities in ‘The Anti-Shanty’, to and The Last Hedgehog. Pam’s
atmospheric and wry depiction of the grey squirrel who didn’t ask to be autobiography, The Necessary
Raj-era India in the 1920s. the city is on the brink of all-out of Lockdown. The Daily Express brought here from America anyway in Aptitude, was a bestseller when it
religious war. Can Wyndham and agrees: “Cracking... A journey into ‘I Got the Wrong was published in 2011.
The latest in the series, The Banerjee, officers of the Imperial the dark underbelly of the Face’, and the
Shadows of Men, is arguably his Police Force, track down those British Raj.” wisecracking fox On radio she is a regular on Just
best yet. Set in 1923, a time of responsible in time to stop a in ‘The Fox Rap’. a Minute, has had six series of
St Mary’s Church Hall heightened political tension, it bloodbath? Mukherjee, whose books have sold her own Ayres on the Air, and has Memorial Hall
£10 is partly driven by Mukherjee’s more than 250,000 copies and been Pam will also appeared twice on the legendary Marlborough College
£12
Saturday 1 October own despair at the rise of Hindu “Abir Mukherjee is doing something translated into 15 languages, used be performing Desert Island Discs. In autumn
5.30pm nationalism in modern India. uniquely different in the crime to work as an accountant, but he’s poems from her 2022 Pam will be seen on Channel Saturday 1 October
7pm
When a Hindu theologian is genre... breathtaking,” says given up the day job to write full last book, On 5 in the second series of The
found murdered in his home, Peter May, bestselling author time. Accountancy’s loss is our gain. Animals, which Cotswolds.
2 0 marlboroughlitfest.org Box Office 0333 6663366 2 1Our children’s events are sponsored by St Francis School,
C h i l d r e n ’s L i t F e s t
C h i l d r e n ’s L i t F e s t
marlborough.news and Hamilton Trust. Prizes for our children’s
competition are donated by Haine & Smith Opticians.
Fre e E v e n t s Morag Hood Jacqueline Wilson
for Schools Teapot Trouble Project Fairy
Every year we are proud to offer free events Something or someone This promises to be a real treat
with popular authors for invited local schools. is living inside Duck’s for all Jacqueline Wilson fans and
This year Maz Evans, author of the Vi Spy teapot! Who are they? those still to discover her. You’ll
and the Who Let the Gods Out series, will be What do they want? How will we get them learn how she started her writing
entertaining Year 5 and 6 pupils from Pewsey out? Never fear, for Tiny Horse is here! career and how she created some
and surrounding villages, whilst Catherine of her best-loved characters, and
Johnson, author of historical novel Freedom Bring your little ones along for an hour of find out all about her brand new
and true story Race to the Frozen North, will fun with this award-winning author and book, Project Fairy, a magical,
be inspiring Year 5 and 6 pupils from the illustrator. Featuring interactive storytelling captivating story about fairies,
Marlborough area. and live drawing, under-fives will love families and friendship, with
hearing of the antics of Duck and Tiny Horse, illustrations by Rachael Dean.
This year’s Big School Read, for secondary who star in Spaghetti Hunters and Hood’s
school children, is Simon James Green, one latest picture book Teapot Trouble. Everyone Dame Jacqueline is one of Britain’s
of the UK’s leading writers of LGBTQ+ teen can take part in a draw-along, creating a bestselling children’s authors, with earlier this year, featuring As well as winning many awards
fiction. Green’s books include Gay Club!, teapot and a mysterious creature to live over 100 books published, more the popular characters from for her books, including the
Sleepover Takeover and You’re the One inside it! than 40 million copies sold and the original books, as well as Children’s Book of the Year, Dame
That I Want. legions of loyal fans throughout the fantastical new lands and a new Jacqueline is a former Children’s
Hood was the winner of the UKLA book White Horse Bookshop world. She wanted to be a writer group of modern-day children. Laureate, and in 2008 was awarded Memorial Hall
Town Hall Marlborough College
Thursday 29 September Sixth Form Debate awards in the 3–6 category in 2018 for Colin
£5
from the age of six and has been But it is characters such as Tracy a DBE. Children £5 Adults £7.50
4pm-5.30pm and Lee, Carrot and Pea, and in 2019 for Saturday 1 October writing ever since. Beaker and Hetty Feather, as well
10am & 11.30am Friday 30 September 6pm
Tickets required but free Sixth formers from St John’s Academy battle I Am Bat. Her books have been nominated as bravely addressing serious Books will be on sale at the event
it out in front of a public audience. Their for several other awards, including the Kate Free for under-fives Her sequel to Enid Blyton’s topics and real-life issues, for with a bookplate signed by Dame Age 7+
subject: love and jealousy in literature. Greenaway Medal. The Faraway Tree was published which she is best known. Jacqueline.
2 2 marlboroughlitfest.org Box Office 0333 6663366 2 3C h i l d r e n ’s L i t F e s t
Tr a ce y C o rd e ro y M a x H a st i n g s
T h e S t o r y S h o p : B l a st O f f ! A b y s s : T h e C u b a n M i s s i le C r i s i s 1 9 6 2
Looking for adventure? Want to be a Tracey Corderoy lives in the Before 24 February this year, as the threat of mutual destruction
hero? Step inside the Story Shop! Cotswolds with her family and a anyone considering the subject seemed not just possible, but
host of lively pets. Once a primary matter of Max Hastings’ latest probable.
Join award-winning children’s school teacher, she now writes historical work would have found
author, Tracey Corderoy, who full time and has published over it just that – history, rooted in time Celebrated historian and top
will be chatting about The Story 70 books since 2010, including the and place. After all, the threat of journalist Hastings combines his
Shop: Blast Off!, where the perfect Shifty McGifty and Hubble Bubble nuclear war has long since faded, usual forensic research and insight
adventure awaits every customer. series. hasn’t it? Terrifyingly, Vladimir to bring a fresh immediacy to the
There’ll be a space game and some Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and crisis, focusing on the leaders at
interactive drawing too. his threat to unleash Russia’s its heart – US President John F
nuclear arsenal, has dragged the Kennedy, Soviet First Secretary
The Story Shop: Blast Off! is the first world into what could be another Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban
in Corderoy’s fresh and funny new Cold War between nuclear-armed leader Fidel Castro – and also the
series of chapter books, illustrated superpowers. Russian officers, American pilots,
by Tony Neal. Packed full of plots, British disarmers and Cuban
costumes and characters galore, It was 60 years ago, in October peasants who found themselves
shopkeepers Wilbur and Fred are 1962, that America and the Soviet caught up in the maelstrom, staring
St Mary’s Church Hall ready and waiting to find every Union faced off after a US pilot into the abyss.
£5 Town Hall
customer their perfect adventure. flying over Cuba discovered that £10
Photo: Toby Madden
Sunday 2 October When a daredevil mouse visits the the Soviets had installed nuclear
2.30pm Sunday 2 October
shop, Wilbur and Fred have just the missiles on the island, just 90 10am
Age 5–8 thing: an out-of-this-world space miles from the US mainland. For
mission! 13 days, the world held its breath
2 4 marlboroughlitfest.org Box Office 0333 6663366 2 5Katherine MacInnes C love r S t ro u d
Snow Widows T h e R e d o f M y B lo o d
The story is seared into the British Wilson, scientist and much-loved Written in the form of diary entries, Clover Stroud is one of our most The result is The Red of My Blood,
consciousness: how Captain Scott wife of the team doctor; Emily MacInnes reconstructs the actions, candid writers, someone who looks a life-affirming exploration of what
and his intrepid companions made Bowers, patriotic mother of Birdie; thoughts and emotions of the five life in the eye and doesn’t shy it means to be human. The book
their final, fatal trip to the Antarctic in Caroline Oates, whose son famously women as the polar drama plays away. Even when she is faced with has become an instant bestseller,
1911/12. Beaten to the South Pole by sacrificed himself; and Lois Evans, out, thousands of miles away, agonising loss. A few weeks before following on from the success of
Amundsen, they struggled – injured, a working-class woman struggling in agonisingly slow motion, all Christmas, in 2019, her sister The Wild Other and My Wild and
malnourished, pulling their own to feed her three children, who was against a backdrop of a vanishing Nell Gifford died of breast cancer, Sleepless Nights: A Mother’s Story,
sledges – back towards base camp, the wife of Royal Naval Petty Officer Edwardian Britain marching aged 46. The founder of Gifford’s winning praise for its raw and
only to die just a few miles short. Edgar ‘Taff’ Evans. inexorably to war. Circus, Nell had been given years intimate account of Stroud’s first
to live and her sudden death tore year of mourning.
But what of those who waved off their Stroud’s life apart. But she not only
menfolk and were waiting anxiously dealt with it, she set about helping “A beautiful addition to the
for their return? In Snow Widows: others to navigate through the literature of loss,” according to
Scott’s Fatal Antarctic Expedition bleakest hours of grief. “I wanted The Sunday Times. “It will serve
Through the Eyes of the Women They to take all this sorrow and turn it as a lit match, to be passed from
Left Behind, Katherine MacInnes into something positive, something one person to the next in the
Photo: Kate Stuart Photography
thrillingly recreates the stories of creative, to make sense of being darkest moments.”
St Mary’s Church Hall five female relatives of the polar alive,” she says. Town Hall
£10 party in the months before and after £10
Photo: Paul Clarke
Sunday 2 October the men’s tragic deaths: Kathleen Sunday 2 October
10am Scott, a sculptor of national renown 11.30am
and the free-spirited, free-thinking
wife of the expedition leader; Oriana
2 6 marlboroughlitfest.org Box Office 0333 6663366 2 7Anita Sethi & Simon Parker James Runcie
T h e G re a t Pa s s i o n
This event brings together two very different writers were mourning the death of a friend
individuals and two very different journeys. and coping with anxiety. But, while Sethi Before you pick up James Runcie’s bullied so badly that he runs away,
But, united in time (2019/2020) and place turns her focus inwards, Riding Out is a moving and multi-layered novel, go finding refuge in the house of the
(Britain), together they speak to the need for record of how, in every corner of Britain, the to your music system and put on choirmaster, one JS Bach. Stefan
resilience in the face of life’s storms. pandemic impacted people and places. Both Bach’s St Matthew Passion, ideally revels in the creative chaos of the
journeys are a timely reminder perhaps that the entire oratorio. For at the heart Bach household, teeming with
In 2019 a racial incident on the travel has more to do with a state of mind and soul of The Great Passion music and mayhem.
TransPennine Express plunged author than mileage. is Bach’s longest, and perhaps
and journalist Anita Sethi into depression. greatest, work, one of the pinnacles Then, a death. In place of joy, grief.
Determined to turn ugliness and insult into of western civilisation. Yet from that grief comes music –
adventure, she resolved to walk the Pennine and what music. Gradually, Stefan
Way. The story of that walk, “my journey of Such ethereal beauty is a long finds himself intimately drawn into
reclamation,” is as much about roots as it way from the thoughts of Stefan a work of art that, he begins to
is routes. The first in a trilogy, I Belong Here Silbermann, realise, will rank with anything ever
is a book that weaves big concepts about the novel’s written, a work that will be unveiled
place, identity and belonging into a story 11-year-old to the world on Good Friday, 1727.
about a burgeoning appreciation of nature. narrator,
who in 1726 Best known for the seven books in
St Mary’s Church Hall The following year, travel writer Simon is sent to the his Grantchester Mysteries series, Town Hall
Photo: Jillian Edelstein
£10 Parker set off on a 3500-mile bike ride choir school Runcie has moved from 1950s £10
Sunday 2 October around Britain. Starting and finishing in of St Thomas Cambridgeshire to eighteenth- Sunday 2 October
11.30am Orkney, Parker pedalled from Shetland to Church in century Lutheran Germany. 1pm
the Isles of Scilly, Dover to Durness. Like Leipzig, What a stunning transition.
Sethi, his journey was part therapy: both where he is
2 8 marlboroughlitfest.org Box Office 0333 6663366 2 9Louise Willder L u c y E a st h o p e
B l u r b Yo u r E n t h u s i a s m : A n A – Z o f L i t e ra r y Pe rs u a s i o n W h e n t h e D u st S e t t le s
They’re only words – usually about the years, and to impart a bit of the bereaved. She recounts her
100 of them – but they can be a key publishing gossip on the way.” own stories of love and loss, from
influence on whether someone will growing up in the shadow of the
buy a book or not. Louise Willder Some authors hate blurbs so much Hillsborough tragedy to miscarrying
has been writing the ‘blurbs’ on the they’ve been known to burn their her first child.
back of books for Penguin for more own books; there’s something
than 25 years and, 5000 of them about these teasing lines, however, Human decency shines through the
later, she’s broken free and written that suggests the master’s touch: telling of these extreme experiences.
a whole book. “This book is also about quotes, Quietly stoical, Easthope lifts the
titles, first lines, hooks, adverts, lid on what happens behind closed
Photo: Caitlin Chescoe
Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A–Z of puns, swearing, plots, someone doors away from the TV cameras.
Literary Persuasion shines a light called Belinda and much more.” “We are a Cinderella service,” she
on this hidden art, including the Who’s Belinda? You’ll have to buy notes, “sweeping up below stairs.”
importance of ensuring there’s an the book to find out.
animal on the front cover and why Candid, sometimes angry, but also
literary novels should never be “We’re all disaster survivors now,” The job – and the book – is not for darkly funny, her memoir spotlights
‘luminous’. writes Lucy Easthope, expert the faint hearted: dealing with the the human spirit’s capacity to survive
White Horse Bookshop emergency planner. For more than immediate practicalities following the darkest hours. When the Dust St Mary’s Church Hall
£10 ‘‘Writing something longer than 100 20 years she has been at the heart of a catastrophe, Easthope is no Settles is a work of hope. A Radio 4 £10
words has been a novel and joyful coping with international disasters, stranger to the grisly realities of Book of the Week, it is also a book
Photo: Tim Riley
Sunday 2 October Sunday 2 October
1pm experience,” she says. “I’m thrilled from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami to body bags and morgues. But she is for our time. 1pm
to share what I’ve learned about the Grenfell fire and, most recently, also alive to the needs of survivors:
the art of literary persuasion over the COVID-19 pandemic. the displaced, the traumatised and
3 0 marlboroughlitfest.org Box Office 0333 6663366 3 1Joanna Quinn Sam Knight
T h e W h a le b o n e T h e a t re T h e P re m o n i t i o n s B u re a u
Critics have fallen over themselves the Dorset coast into a theatre in forward, including two particularly
to lavish praise on this debut novel which to act out the plays she finds gifted ‘percipients’. One of them
by Dorset author Joanna Quinn, in her dead father’s study. As she described having seen a train crash
describing it as “an utterly captivating forges her own unconventional story and the words ‘Charing Cross’. Four
Photo: Olivia Arthur/Magnum Photos
epic romp with characters you cannot she grows into an “unmarriageable” days later, a train from Hastings
help but fall in love with,” and a young woman working behind enemy to Charing Cross derailed, killing
“sheer, undiluted delight from start lines in occupied France. 49 people. And then she made
to finish.” her most sinister prediction of all:
Quinn has commented that war, like Barker’s own death.
Set in a big house on the Dorset coast pandemics, takes plots and lives in
and spanning the decades between unexpected directions. Ten years in Sam Knight, a British journalist
the end of World War I and the the writing and finished in lockdown, with The New Yorker magazine,
aftermath of World War II, this multi- the novel tells Barker’s fascinating and eerie
generational saga is indeed both sparked a four- On 20 October 1966, a ten-year-old Are premonitions real? Can story in The Premonitions Bureau,
“reassuringly familiar and startlingly way auction and Welsh girl told her mother that people actually predict disasters? which is soon to be a film after a
new.” By turns hilarious and heart- has been called she’d had a disturbing dream. John Barker, a 1960s maverick 19-way auction amongst streamers
breaking, it is written with energy, the book of the “I dreamt I went to school and there psychiatrist, certainly thought so. and studios. It doesn’t take a
White Horse Bookshop precision and “a circus playfulness.” summer. was no school there,” she said. Fascinated by the Aberfan story, soothsayer to predict that it’s going Town Hall
£10 “Something black had come down he established the Premonitions to be a big hit. £10
Photo: Nancy Turner
Sunday 2 October At its heart is the coming-of-age all over it.” The next morning, she Bureau with the London Evening Sunday 2 October
2.30pm story of Cristabel Seagrave, a bookish went to school and was killed in Standard, asking people to 2.30pm
12-year-old orphan, who turns the the Aberfan disaster, when a coal contact the newspaper with their
ribs of a dead whale washed up on slurry tip buried an entire village. predictions. Hundreds came
3 2 marlboroughlitfest.org Box Office 0333 6663366 3 3C h r i st i n a L a m b T h e B i g Town R ead
The Prince Rupert Hotel for the Homeless The Man on Hackpen Hill by JS Monroe
Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times’ for the Homeless, is set not in Billed by TV presenter Tom Bradby adds to the fun of this fast-paced
chief foreign correspondent, has Helmand or war-torn Aleppo but as “a kind of Wiltshire Da Vinci and tense page turner. No spoilers
travelled with the Mujahideen in in the Shropshire market town of Code,” The Man on Hackpen Hill, by here but, after reading The Man on
Afghanistan. She was on the bus Shrewsbury. local author JS Monroe, was always Hackpen Hill, you will never look at a
with politician Benazir Bhutto when going to be a must for this black Range Rover in your rear-view
it was blown up in 2007. And she’s Billed as a snapshot of Britain in year’s Big Town Read. This mirror in quite the same way again…
been deported from Pakistan for lockdown, it tells how a four-star is the annual event we run
uncovering a covert operation to hotel with four-poster beds and with Wiltshire Libraries This is the third JS Monroe thriller
supply the Taliban with arms. In suits of armour became home for which we encourage to feature DI Silas Hart and DS
short, she’s risked life and limb to for 33 rough sleepers as part everyone to come along with Strover. Under his real name,
report from some of the world’s of the government’s ‘Everyone questions for the author. Jon Stock is also the author of five
most dangerous conflict zones. As In’ programme. Their lives, and spy thrillers, one of which, Dead Spy
if that’s not enough, she’s also a those of the hotel’s owners, As well as enjoying the Running, was optioned by Warner
fierce champion of women’s rights, change forever in a story of love twists and turns of this Bros. Formerly,
whether it’s drawing attention to and compassion that’s as heart- tightly plotted psychological Stock worked
the girls abducted by Boko Haram warming as it is heart-breaking. thriller, readers can relish the as a foreign
in Nigeria or co-writing Malala switchback ride through Wiltshire’s correspondent
Town Hall Yousafzai’s global bestseller, highways and byways as the in India and Town Hall
£10 I Am Malala. protagonists are pursued across edited the £10
Sunday 2 October the county by the villains of the Weekend Sunday 2 October
4pm It might come as a surprise, piece. From Hackpen Hill’s deadly section of The 5.30pm
then, to learn that her latest crop circle to the shadowy figures Daily Telegraph.
book, The Prince Rupert Hotel of Porton Down, name-checking
3 4 marlboroughlitfest.org Box Office 0333 6663366 3 5P a t r i c k G a le
M o t h e r ’s B oy
“Cornwall is the second a widowed mother
poorest region in the UK, and hard-working
but it happens to be very washerwoman, who
beautiful,” said Patrick gradually comes to
Gale of his adopted realise that her son is a
county in an interview literary prodigy.
with The Observer in
2015. “So although a lot The novel, Gale’s
With Hiscox Home Insurance there is no of households here are seventeenth, is based
need to accessorise with a second policy struggling financially, around the known
for high-value items like jewellery and many say they’re happy facts of the boyhood
watches. Just tell us the items you want and feel that their children and youth of Charles
to cover. And we’ll take care of the rest. have a nice time. That mixture of Causley, a poet and man of
hard-bitten and poor, and yet rich letters for whom Cornwall was
Experts in home insurance. in natural beauty certainly feeds my always home and who was lauded
kind of writing.” throughout his lifetime by literary
giants such as Ted Hughes and
Hard-bitten and poor, rich in Seamus Heaney. Town Hall
natural beauty… Fast-forward £10
seven years and Gale’s words ring Central to the novel is Laura’s Sunday 2 October
uncannily true in Mother’s Boy. Set relationship with her son, the young 7pm
in Cornwall during and after World man who hides a secret life that
War I, it tells the story of Laura, neither dare reveal.
Hiscox Underwriting Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
22116 07/21
20016 05/22
Box Office 0333 6663366 3 7Events at a Glance Memorial Hall
The Town Hall
A late Victorian building which dominates
Marlborough The White Horse the east end of the High Street. The
T H U R S DAY 11.30am 4pm 11.30am
College By car or foot Bookshop Assembly Room is the main festival venue.
4pm p22 MORAG HOOD p17 BOBBY PALMER & p28 ANITA SETHI &
White Horse Bookshop AYANNA LLOYD BANWO SIMON PARKER from the High Street, is conveniently located The Court Room will be a bookshop and
p22 SIXTH FORM DEBATE head west on the A4. within a minute’s walk from
11.30am St Mary’s Church Hall St Mary’s Church Hall café for the weekend. Parking is available
Town Hall
p8 HANNAH BOURNE- 4pm Pass under a brick the Town Hall on the north in the High Street or in Waitrose car park,
7.30pm 1pm
TAYLOR p18 PHILIP HOARE p29 JAMES RUNCIE footbridge and the side of the High Street. between the High Street and George Lane.
p4 HANNAH LOWE
Memorial Hall St Mary’s Church Hall White Horse Bookshop Town Hall college is on the left.
P
Marlborough College 11.30am 5pm 1pm The venue will be
p9 KAMILA SHAMSIE p12 POETRY IN THE PUB p30 LOUISE WILLDER signposted.
F R I DAY Town Hall The Green Dragon White Horse Bookshop White Horse
6pm 1pm 5.30pm Bookshop
1pm Marlborough
p23 JACQUELINE p10 ANDREW MILLER p19 ANDREW RUMSEY & p31 LUCY EASTHOPE Library
WILSON St Mary’s Church Hall COLIN HEBER-PERCY St Mary’s Church Hall
Memorial Hall 1pm Town Hall
p11 ADAM NICOLSON 5.30pm 2.30pm Marlborough
Marlborough College p24 TRACEY CORDEROY College
7.30pm Town Hall p20 ABIR MUKHERJEE
St Mary’s Church Hall The
p5 ALI SMITH 2pm-4.30pm St Mary’s Church Hall Green
2.30pm Dragon St Mary’s Church Hall is next door to the
Town Hall p12 MEMOIR WRITING 7pm
p32 JOANNA QUINN church behind the Town Hall. Access is from
WORKSHOP p21 PAM AYRES P
S AT U R DAY Quaker Meeting House Memorial Hall White Horse Bookshop Quaker the bottom of Kingsbury Street via Patten Alley.
Meeting From the church follow signs to the entrance
10am 2.30pm Marlborough College 2.30pm House Katharine
p6 JO BROWNING WROE p13 BENEDICT ALLEN p33 SAM KNIGHT The Green Dragon House of the hall up steps to the left of the church.
St Mary’s Church Hall Town Hall S U N DAY Town Hall stands on the south Gallery Step-free access is from Silverless Street.
10am 2.30pm 10am 4pm side of the High Street,
p7 GILES WHITTELL p14 TRANSLATION DUEL p25 MAX HASTINGS p34 CHRISTINA LAMB 100 metres from the
Town Hall St Mary’s Church Hall Town Hall Town Hall Town Hall. Originally a
10am 2.30pm 10am 5.30pm coaching inn, it dates
p22 MORAG HOOD p15 DOREEN p26 KATHERINE p35 THE BIG TOWN READ back to the 15th century.
White Horse Bookshop CUNNINGHAM MACINNES JS Monroe
11am White Horse Bookshop St Mary’s Church Hall Town Hall
p12 COLLECTABLE 4pm 11.30am 7pm
BOOKS ROADSHOW p16 MIKE PITTS p27 CLOVER STROUD p37 PATRICK GALE Katharine House Gallery, The Parade. From the Quaker Meeting House, The Parade,
Katharine House Gallery Town Hall Town Hall Town Hall Town Hall, cross the pedestrian crossing opposite is on the right between the Parade Cinema
The Bear and walk down The Parade. Katharine House and the Fire Station. It will be signposted.
3 8 marlboroughlitfest.org is at the bottom of the road facing you.Our handpicked, top-quality range of bulbs, seeds,
and plants are tried and tested in Sarah’s garden
at Perch Hill in East Sussex, not only to look and
taste fantastic but to be highly productive.
In addition, we offer a well-crafted selection of garden
kit and accessories. Only those items that have stood
the test of time will make it into our range, so you
can be sure to enjoy them for years to come.
The Sarah Raven head office opened in
Marlborough in 2008, and we currently employ
70 people from the local community.
We are proud to sponsor Marlborough LitFest,
a brilliant local event that gets bigger and
better each year.
Join us
@sarahravensgarden
@sarahravensgarden
@srkitchengarden
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