BookAmp: the literary festival newsletter
January is always a busy time for festivals as programme deadlines suddenly appear a lot closer than they did before Christmas. The spring festivals don’t even have that luxury they are now anxiously waiting to see how the first day of sales go. This can be the most important day of the year - out of the 152,223 tickets sold at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 60,448 are bought on that crucial first day.
Leeds Lit Fest, taking place at the start of March, is one of those festivals releasing its first wave of tickets this week. Now in its second year headliners include Jenny Éclair, Helen Fielding, AC Grayling and Gavin Esler. They are expecting 10,000 will attend over five days. We were particularly taken with The Otely Run Poetry Walk. Award-winning Leeds poet Joe Williams’ latest book is An Otley Run, a verse novella telling the story of a day spent doing the city’s most famous pub crawl. Joe will perform the entire book, as the audience and him go on the pub crawl. The programme notes, ‘this walk includes alcohol’.
One of the great aspects of literary festival culture (and at the heart of the Leeds festival) is involvement with local communites. Two small festivals that caught our eye:
Firstly - and taking place tomorrow is the seventh annual ‘Civil War’ event, organised by Nantwich Book Shop & Coffee Lounge, on the day before the ‘Battle of Nantwich’ re-enactment in the town. It will feature authors Norah Carlin, Margaret Evans and Mark Turnbull amongst others. The 25th January is known locally as Holly Holy Day and commemorates the lifting of the Siege of Nantwich during the English Civil War in 1644. The name is derived from the locals wearing sprigs of holly in their hats to celebrate.
Secondly, the Clevendon Community Bookshop in Somerset is launching its own festival. ‘More than Words’ will take place on June 13 and will involve a number of venues across the seaside town. The shop is a community enterprise that took over and then expanded an existing second-hand book shop. It opened its doors on 31 December 2011. Owned and run by people of Clevedon it receives and sells second-hand books and some new books along with cards, gift vouchers and bags.
What a wonderful world…
Gill and John McLay have launched Wonder a non-profit organisation that will put on a year-round series of children’s book events in the South-West. In 2007, the McLays’ co-founded the Bath Festival of Children’s Literature in 2007 but left last year. They are already organising one off events but in October are producing an eight day festival Wonder 2020 across venues in Bath. We wish them every sucecss. We were particularly taken with their new branding.
Crime capital of the UK
Another digital festival! This time it is the turn of Capital Crime, that launched as a real world event last year in the Connaught Rooms in Cvent Garden. Their digital ‘year round’ festival features authors presumabably filmed at the 2019 festival. These clips are then cut up in different ways. It features a number of well-known writers like SJ Watson and Mark Edwards.
That’s it for this newsletter! Please follow us on twitter and instagram, add us to your press release list and feel free to get in touch if there is anything you would like us to write about: mathew@bookamp.co.uk.