The Literary Festival Newsletter
Escape Rooms
There are now over 1500 escape rooms in the UK, these locked room puzzling adventures have been one of the more surprising entertainment formats to take off in the last few years. There are a few big branded ones in London, notably Sherlock and Doctor Who, but the majority are found in regional tourist attractions. Family camping festival Geronimo has announced that Breakout who run 41 escape rooms across the country are bringing a selection to their festival. It seems like an obvious step for literary festivals to commission writers to create them but so far that hasn’t really happened - I am sure it will. The closest I can find is Escape Rooms in Cheltenham who partnered with local author Kim Fleet to create an escape room based on her Cheltenham-set crime novel Paternoster.
Festival Announcements
It’s always a tricky decision. How do you make the most of your festival programme announcement? Some people will have a ‘Friends’ group that get early ticket access, some people will centre it around the printed programme and some people will organise a preview night featuring a taste of what is coming up. I always think these evenings work really well - Huddersfield are doing just that with a preview on Shrove Tuesday including the poet Michael Stewart and an In Conversation with Sairish Hussai.
HLF2020 runs from 19-29 March. This year’s line-up includes Bernardine Evaristo, Val McDermid, Lemn Sissay and Anton Du Beke, plus Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister, Being Mr Wickham, Celebrating Toni Morrison, a Moomins puppet show and a Qawalli Night.
The worst ever festival press launch I attended was at the Groucho Club (already a bad sign in my opinion) for a new festival in the south of England. There were no press at the launch and it was all a bit embarassing for everyone there. Suffice to say the festival only lasted one year.
New Festival Alert!
Stafford’s first Literary Festival will take place on Saturday 18th April 2020, 10am to 4pm at Stafford Gatehouse Theatre. This year’s event is being sponsored by the University of Wolverhampton in Stafford, along with Stafford Borough Council and it’s organised by Stafford Publishers Ltd.
Killer Queeeeeeen
Now in its fourth year, we love the Killer Women Festival of Crime Writing and Drama. It was started by a group of 19 leading female crime writers in 2015 to support and promote women’s voices in crime fiction. They always put together a really imaginative programme. This year it includes an exclusive competition in honour of CSI pioneer and mother of forensic science Frances Glessner Lee, who created the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death: 20 miniature crime scenes made for the purpose of training homicide detectives, many still in use today. There is also a live recording of the podcast You’re Booked with Ann Cleeves, acclaimed writer of Shetland and Vera, in conversation with Daisy Buchanan. But my favourite event is Puppy Control. This is a session with Ruth and Chris Bon from Alpha Canine Specialists. They are going to show how they train sniffer dogs (with three of their dogs) and explain why canine policing on TV is always done wrong.
The Killer Women are also used to working with festivals to put together events - details on their website here.
24 Hour Technicolour Dream
Equally imaginative is Lowestoft’s multi-arts First Light Festival which has just announced its 2020 dates 20-21 June. What makes First Light special is that it takes place over a 24-hour period on the summer solstice, ‘celebrating one cycle of midsummer sun, setting and rising over the beach in Britain’s most easterly town’. It reminds me of the all-night White Night Festival that originated in St Petersburg. There was a moment about ten years when a few places in Britain adopted the format.
The Quiet Volume at Leeds
Artists Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells bring their unique The Quiet Volume immersive experience to Leeds Lit Fest 2020. The Quiet Volume is an intimate theatrical experience performed to an audience of two at a time about books, reading, and the communal experience of the library. It is an hour long, whispered, self-generated and 'automatic' performance, exploiting the particular tension common to any library worldwide—a combination of silence and concentration within which different experiences of reading unfold. Further details here.
Other acts booked for Leeds include Amanda Owen, The Yorkshire Shepherdess, Stuart Maconie, Jenny Éclair, Helen Fielding, AC Grayling, Gavin Esler, Duncan Hamilton and Dave Haslam.
Free for all
We were impressed to see that the Deptford Literary Festival coming up on 14 March has an amazing 14 out of 17 events that are free (and four BSL interpreted). It is produced by Spread the Word in collaboration with independent producer Tom MacAndrew. Spread the Word are London’s writing development agency and like the other regional agencies do so much for grass roots literary culture.
Charleston Festival has also announced that they are releasing 1,000 tickets at £10 for the under 30s. Their standard event tickets are £16 but for headliners the price can be £20-25 (their highest price this year is £50 for Helena Bonham-Carter and Tobias Menzies reading the love letters of the economist John Maynard-Keynes).
In Vogue
On 25 February, Bernardine Evaristo will appear in conversation with Vogue’s features editor Olivia Marks as part of Vogue Talks – a new series of live interviews sponsored by Bombay Saphire, with leading names from the worlds of books, film and the arts. Tickets are priced at £20.
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. You can get your fellow lit festival colleagues to sign up here.
P.S. an apology to Annie Ashworth, boss at Stratford Literary Festival, for spelling her name wrongly in the last newsletter.