Elly Griffiths discusses her new Victorian novel The Frozen People at this year’s festival. Steph Mackentyre asked the best-selling crime author about her work space.

Elly, can you tell us a bit about where you write?

‘Well, I’m talking to you from my writing shed, which is at the top of my garden! I live just outside Brighton. I can see a little bit of the sea from my writers shed. I swim every day. I’ve already swum today. Sometimes in the sea – there’s an open air pool as well. Today I was in the pool, which is colder than the sea, I have to say!

‘So it’s a little writing shed, just room for my desk and my chair, and very importantly a chair for Pip the cat, and bookcases. I try to come up here and do my 1000 words a day. Pip is very good, actually, because he usually comes up to the shed about 9am and sits outside, looking hopeful. He’s kind of like my conscience. He sort of says to me, it’s time to start writing!

‘I am not one of those writers who writes on planes and trains and automobiles, although I know some great writers who do that, or who go to cafes and like a bit of ambient noise. I really like here it in the writing shed, the silence… Apart from the cat. He’s not always very silent!’

Are there any other writers who inspire you, whose books you have around you?

‘I have a lot of friends who are writing at the moment. Crime writing is a really warm community. A lot of us are very close – we share our writing woes and triumphs. I’ve got two very close writing friends, Lesley Thomson and William Shaw [speaker at the 2024 Felixstowe Book Festival], and we often talk, and say where we are with our books.

‘But I have to say, inspiration-wise, particularly for this book, it was Victorian writers. My favourite writer of all time is time is probably Wilkie Collins. So I think about Wilkie Collins, and him writing those amazing books, in long-hand, and writing in serial form so people read them every week, and wanted more. So I think, probably, if I could be half the hard worker Wilkie Collins was, I’d be happy!’

Elly Griffiths will be appearing on Sunday 29 June 2025 at 4.30pm

With tens of thousands of new books published in the UK each year, how do literary festival programmers choose? Meg Reid tells Louise Millar about the three twists of fate that led to biographer Ian Collins speaking about Ronald Blythe at the 2025 festival.

Ronald Blythe, who died aged 101 in 2023, is known to many of us as the writer and essayist who chronicled rural life in Suffolk. His best-known book, Akenfield: Portrait Of An English Village, a fictionalised account of agricultural life in the first half of the 20th century, inspired Peter Hall’s 1974 film Akenfield.

Festival director Meg Reid has been a longtime fan of Blythe’s The Time By The Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58. The detailed account of his life in the town includes a strange encounter with fellow writer EM Foster.

‘It gives you such a sense of the landscape, and stories of Suffolk,’ Meg says of the book. ‘Blythe brings the past alive.’

Yet, she reveals, it was only while shopping in Felixstowe last year that her interest in Blythe’s wider work really reawakened.

‘I saw a stack of Blythe’s books in the window of [secondhand bookshop] Treasure Chest,’ she says. ‘I bought them all, and started to re-engage with his writing.’

In a second twist of fate, when Ian Collins’ new biography, Blythe Spirit: The Remarkable Life Of Ronald Blythe, came to Meg’s attention, she remembered that the author had also written about James Dodds, an artist whom she had taught at school as a teenager. Already aware of Ian’s talent as a biographer, as a result, she was keen to read his new work, which tells his friend Blythe’s story for the first time.

‘Ian has had unparalleled access to Blythe’s letters and notebooks, and has had conversations over decades with him,’ she says. ‘In the biography, Blythe talks about the process of being a writer, how he came to it.’

And in a third twist of fate, Meg discovered that the festival has another unexpected connection to Ronald Blythe. ‘In The Time By The Sea, Blythe talks about going to a teashop in Aldeburgh,’ she says. ‘And it turns out it was run by the aunt of our festival treasurer, Jez!’

It was obviously all meant to be!

Ian Collins will discuss his new book with novelist Nicola Upson, on 29 June at 12pm, with a book signing to follow.

We asked our Felixstowe Book Festival patrons Esther Freud, Sir Terry Waite KCMG CBE and Robin Ince, and festival chair Meg Reid, which books they’ll be reading and buying for family and friends this Christmas – and hoping to receive!

ESTHER FREUD

Which book would you like to receive this Christmas?

I have asked for Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. I’m curious to see how she’s developing her talent and her voice.

Which book would you give others at Christmas?

The book I give really depends on the person receiving it, and I make notes through the year. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, or books for the children in my life: Hannah Gold’s Turtle Moon and Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures.

Is there a book you love to re-read at Christmas?

I’m not a great re-reader – too many new books. But if I had to choose, it would be A Winter Book by Tove Jansson.

SIR TERRY WAITE KCMG CBE

Which book would you like to receive this Christmas?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky had a profound understanding of the working of the mind. Although I have read most of his works, I could easily re-read any one of them. Crime And Punishment is one of his finest writings.

Which book would you give others at Christmas?

The two volumes entitled The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist. Oddly titled, but a fascinating study of the brain and how contemporary life is being shaped by over-concentration on the left hemisphere.

Is there a book you love to re-read at Christmas?

Anything by Charles Dickens to remind me of Christmas as it was in Victorian times

ROBIN INCE

Which book would you like to receive this Christmas?

My dream Christmas book is Practically True by Ernest Thesiger, an actor and embroiderer best remembered now for [the 1935 film] Bride Of Frankenstein. It is a delightfully catty book, full of wit, but it is very hard to find. I have held a copy in Exeter Library. My guess on its rarity is that anyone mentioned in it would buy every copy they could find and burn it.

Which book would you give others at Christmas?

I will give Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is A Promise, a biography of Audre Lorde. Boy oh boy, does it fizz and spark and inspire. In these bleak times, with the far right gaining immense power, hearing a voice of poetry and passion like Lorde’s fed through the mind of Gumbs, a great poet herself, is just the dynamite we need.

Is there a book you love to re-read at Christmas?

I am going to re-read the first short story collection by Camilla Grudova, The Doll’s Alphabet. Her imagination was where my year began and I will return to it to end my year.

MEG REID

Which book would you like to receive this Christmas?

Long Live Great Bardfield, the autobiography of Tirzah Garwood. I find Garfield’s paintings and woodcuts completely captivating and I want to know how she managed an artistic life despite domestic constraints. It’s a bonus that it is published in the elegant Persephone Books edition.

Which book would you give others at Christmas?

I love to give the latest in any series my 11-year-old granddaughter is reading. She always wants me to read them after her, and I know I will enjoy them. The latest is the Crookhaven The School For Thieves series by JJ Arcanjo, which are as thrilling as any adult thriller.

Is there a book you love to re-read at Christmas?

Christmas At Timothy’s by Gee Denes, the story of a girl, Jennifer, visiting her cousins for Christmas. Buying presents, shopping in a pea soup fog, choosing the tree, putting up paper chains, all on Christmas Eve. It’s a reminder of my 1950s childhood and long-ago Christmases.

We would love to hear about the books you plan to give, re-read and hope to receive this Christmas, too – please share with us!

The Felixstowe Book Festival committee members recall the early stories that turned them into lifelong readers. We’d love to hear about yours, too, in the comments below!

Meg Reid

Minnow On The Say by A Philippa Pearce, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone.

This is a favourite book from my childhood and beyond. David finds Minnow, a canoe, on the River Say behind his garden. Disobeying his parents, he sets off in it to find its owner. This leads him to Adam, who lives with his aunt and grandfather in a dilapidated old house. When the boys find a clue, they take Minnow down the river on a treasure hunt. It’s an exciting and believable adventure story, as much about the boys’ friendship as what they discover. This summer I read it to my two youngest granddaughters, and they couldn’t wait for the next visit to find out what happened next.

Louise Millar

Grimm’s Fairytales by the Brothers Grimm

I can still remember opening the Christmas present from my Glaswegian grandmother, Kathleen, and seeing this magical book appear. Kathleen was a wonderful natural storyteller. We’d often curl up in her huge 1930s armchairs on a rainy day, the electric fire on, as she made up story after story about knights and castles and queens and faraway lands. This book was the perfect place for me, as a child, to explore further that world of fantasy she’d inspired in my imagination, and also, through the book’s dark fables, start gently to understand the perils of the world that lay beyond the innocence of childhood. I read it so many times, the cover broke, but it still sits on my bookshelf, one of my most precious possessions.

Stephanie Mackentyre

The Famous Five Collection by Enid Blyton

The vivid pictures Blyton painted in her Famous Five Collection instilled in me as a child a passion for reading which has never left. I still have one collection, which tells the tales of Julian, Dick, Anne, George and their dog Timmy’s adventures around Kirrin Island and Smuggler’s Top. In my mind, I can still see each of the characters so clearly. I always imagined myself as George, the tomboy, always fearless (which I certainly wasn’t as a child!) with her faithful border collie by her side. It took me 50 years, but I finally got to own a border collie myself. I smiled that day, thinking that I had finally morphed into George.

Kerry Addison

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr

This is one of the first books I remember reading as a child that I actually enjoyed. It’s the first of Judith Carr’s Out Of The Hitler time trilogy, and tells the story of Anna, whose wealthy Jewish family is forced to leave Berlin when Adolf Hitler is elected. I borrowed it from my local library when I was a primary school, and finally able to choose for myself. It was such a change from the enforced school library numbered reading scheme, with its dry abridged versions of Charles Dickens and other classics. Today, I still love reading – historical fiction, biographies and war history – and this book is as relevant now as when first published over 50 years ago.

These are our favourite childhood books – please tell us yours!

Memories of this summer’s Felixstowe Book Festival may still be fresh, but work has already started on next year’s event. New festival committee member Louise Millar takes us behind the scenes of what happens next for 2025.

This year I joined the steering committee of the Felixstowe Book Festival – and what an eye-opener it’s been to see what is involved in the planning of next year’s event. Over the years, I’ve attended as a novelist, a panel chair, a ticketholder and a volunteer.

The festival has long been one of my personal favourites for two reasons. First, the friendly atmosphere and the varied programme, set in the Edwardian splendour of Harvest House, with tea and cake and a bookshop on tap, and just a few minutes’ walk from the beach. Second, while the festival might be a prestigious listing in the UK literary events calendar, its deep roots in the local community give it a relaxed, welcoming feel. And, as I found, that extends to committee meetings, held at Founder and Director Meg Reid’s home close to the sea (if you get lost, look for the pile of book packages from publishers on the doorstep) among Meg’s hundreds of books, with accompanying tea and cat.

Yet when it comes to festival work, there is no slouching. After a well-deserved summer off to recuperate, the committee is already hard at work for 2025. Meg explains that at this time of year, her email inbox is now full of new title catalogues from book publishers, listing authors who are available for book events from January to June 2025. ‘Individual authors are emailing me details of their books, too,’ she says. Meg reads the new titles she thinks the festival audience might enjoy, seeking a mix of non-fiction, biography, fiction and poetry, then starts to invite the authors to attend in 2025. She is thrilled to reveal that best-selling novelist Barbara Erskine has already agreed to attend,

and will be interviewed by fellow author Mandy Morton.
‘It’s especially exciting to welcome Barbara back,’ Meg says, ‘as she was one of our very first guest speakers when we began the festival back in 2013.”

Meg is hoping that by 31 December that she ‘will have answers to most of my invitations, and be able to meet the print deadline for our festival bookmarks which we will distribute in February.’ As we wait for more speaker news, the planning goes on. The festival relies heavily on its brilliant volunteers, and supporting Meg on the committee is Kerry Addison, a solicitor by day, who looks after the festival’s sponsors, the loyal supporters who have again committed to sponsoring this popular event for 2025. ‘With out their sponsorship the Felixstowe Book Festival wouldn’t be able to carry on,’ she says. As part of that work, this year Kerry had the excellent idea to launch a new LinkedIn page. “I’m pleased to say that we already have 29 followers,’ she says. ‘If you’d like to support the
festival, we are always looking for more sponsors so please follow our new LinkedIn page and get in touch to find out more. We are looking forward to highlighting the sponsors and
the brilliant work they do in the community.’ Meanwhile, journalist Stephanie Mackentyre, who promotes stories about the festival in local press, reveals she is already getting the ‘publicity feels’, now the author invitations have gone out. ‘I’m excited firstly as a booklover to meet and photograph some of my favourite authors,’ Steph says, ‘and then lucky enough to be there over the festival weekend, taking inspiration from hearing about their work, writing about their attendance and letting our loyal band of supporters know about it too.’ As for me, the newest member of the committee, I’ll be looking after the festival’s blog over the next eight months, updating progress on our line-up, and inviting next year’s authors, as they’re announced, to tell us about the new books they’ll be discussing at the event, and to share insights into their writing lives. As for us, next month, Meg, Kerry, Stephanie and I will be sharing the childhood books thatinspired our own love of reading. Maybe you’ll share some of your own with us?

The Felixstowe Book Festival weekend is 27-29 June 2025 with accompanying weekday events to be announced.

Tom Sykes, author of Coast of Teeth

I love literary festivals for their diversity – and I use that term in its most diverse sense. Many forms and genres are represented, and there’s huge variety amongst the attendees. Twenty years ago, I had an experience that was
unsettling then, but that now I think is symbolic of the wonderful, motley and surprising nature of festivals. At a showcase of new writers, I read a story about a crazed US president who wrecks relations with other nations to trigger nuclear armageddon because he believes he’ll be raptured into heaven. By the end of my reading, all faces were longer than Shergar’s… and the room as lively as Shergar is today. I received no applause. The reader after me was a chirpy woman in a green quilted coat. ‘It’s National Bird Day today!’ she beamed. ‘And I’d like to read you a poem about a gorgeous kingfisher who keeps visiting my garden.’ She got applause. Her poem couldn’t have been more different to my story. At the time, as an insecure newbie writer, I resented her stuff being liked and not mine. But now I see the funny side of the contrast and appreciate that this eclectic event may have exposed an attendee to something new and unexpected. Literary festivals are a wonderful mixed bag like that.

Tom Sykes will be speaking in the Conservatory at 3pm on 29 June

Emily Howes, author of The Painter’s Daughter

I am standing in a cold church, wired up to a Britney mic. Rain is hammering outside, but the pews are full of audience members shaking off umbrellas and peeling away damp anoraks. It is my first literary festival as an
author, and my heart is beating with relief. Book-writing is a quiet, solitary commitment, driven by individual passion. But finally, right at the very end of it all, comes, hopefully, this moment of communion. My fellow debut authors share the highs and lows of book festivals in our newly formed Whatsapp group. The wobbly stools that threaten collapse at any moment. The stomach-lurching moment of silence before the first question. But above all, the joy and surprise of seeing that people have come, and care, and are interested in the work we have given four or five years of our lives to. Tomorrow I’ll sit down again in silence with only my dog and my laptop for company, and book two waiting in some corner of my mind to fill the blank screen. For now, though, there are piles of my finished first novel on the table, and I can savour how it feels to be able, finally, to share my first story, the untold story of Peggy and Molly Gainsborough, and to talk to other people about how it caught my imagination so vividly and privately for so long.

Emily Howes will be speaking in the Conservatory at 11.30am on 30 June

I designed the book festival artwork with Felixstowe’s identity in mind. Having explored the pier and the promenade in recent years, I decided it would be great to make the port the focus this year.

Felixstowe has an important global connection, with thousands of goods being imported and exported at the docks. The huge container ships can be seen for miles, bringing in their brightly coloured shipping containers to be further distributed. 

I’ve recently had the thrill of curating Murder by the Book, an exhibition of crime fiction at Cambridge University Library. The Library holds a stunning collection of rare crime novels across the genre, most in their original dust jackets.

Treasures on show include a first edition of The Moonstone displayed alongside Wilkie Collins’s writing desk; scarce early novels by Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Colin Dexter and Ruth Rendell; delightful letters between P.D. James and Faber, written before the publication of her first novel, Cover Her Face; and a celebration of Agatha Christie, with first editions of iconic novels and many more personal items, generously loaned by the Christie Archive. This includes notebooks, Christie’s typewriter, her dictaphone and the manuscript of the final Poirot novel, Curtain, locked away in a bank vault for thirty years.

One book that people might be surprised to see in the exhibition is Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which has avoided all genre classifications in its 86-year history – but for me, Rebecca has the heart and soul of a crime novel. Not even Hitchcock could improve on du Maurier’s flawless handling of suspense, and the shift in our understanding towards the end of the book is one of the most emotionally credible and deftly handled twists in all fiction.

Mandy Morton and I will be talking about this much-loved story at the Felixstowe Book Festival this year, going behind the scenes of the famous film and revealing the book’s origins, which inspired my latest novel, Shot With Crimson, and which have their own surprising twist…

Murder by the Book runs at Cambridge University Library until 24 August; tickets are free, and can be booked at https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/murderbythebook

Author Chioma Okereke gives us an exclusive peek into her work space