Uncategorized

With just two months to go, our committee is gearing up to launch our new schedule of author events in June. Here, they tell us about the final stages of organising our book festival – and, in particular, why gathering authors’ mobile numbers is so important!

 

 

 

 

 

Meg Reid, festival chair

‘At this stage of the festival, I’m eagerly scanning ticket sales reports to see how well we are doing. And I can reveal that tickets are selling even faster than last year! So far, we’ve sold half in the first two weeks ‘I’m also taking festival brochures with me wherever I go – even on my Mother’s Day breakfast outing – in case there is an opportunity to leave some for people to pick up. ‘There are lots of practical activities to manage at this time of the festival year. I am arranging for the chairs, platforms, and sound equipment I’ve ordered to be delivered on our “get-in” day to Harvester House on 27 June. I’m also keeping our bookseller informed about ticket sales so they know how many books to stock. ‘We promote the festival right up till the last moment, so I’m regularly liaising with our publicity team about press releases, articles and the blog. I’ve done one radio interview so far this year and, as usual, thought I had messed up! ‘As we head into May, I’ll start contacting our speakers and interviewers to give them more information about Felixstowe, if they haven’t been here before, and details of how to claim their appearance fees. ‘A priority will be to collect their mobile phone numbers. We have occasionally “lost” speakers: one who arrived but went off to have a swim; one who mistook the time; and another who mistook the day!’

Stephanie Mackentyre, publicist

‘It’s been so nice to see the local press and radio have been hugely supportive of the Felixstowe Book Festival once again, which makes writing the articles about the forthcoming events and our Patrons all so worthwhile.

‘We’ve recently had a meeting (pictured) which involved the wider group of volunteers who all help to make the festival run like clockwork. As a thank you, we enjoyed some donated wine and chocolates to make the evening go with a swing!

‘However serious business was also discussed including an update on where we are at with current publicity. Although the festival is now only weeks away, there are still plenty of authors to write about, and interviews with visiting authors to conduct, and post online.Then, as the articles appear and the interviews are played, it’s about catching all of those and recording them for the committee to view once the festival is over. That way we can continually review our marketing strategies to see if we are reaching as many book-lovers as possible each year.

‘At the festival itself I’ll be armed with a camera to capture shots of the entertainment as it unfolds each day to share and to keep for next year’s publicity. So not quite time to get out the laurels and rest upon them, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel – if I stand on a pile of books and scan the horizon that is!’

Louise Millar, blog editor

‘One of my favourite blog-slots this year has been our Where I Write series, which gives a fascinating insight into how authors work. I loved best-selling author Tracy Chevalier’s admission that she ignores her lovely writing room, and works on a corner of the sofa instead! We have four more of those blogs coming up, expertly captured on video by our publicist Steph during her interviews with writers for articles. I’ll be writing those up into copy and adding photos.

‘This week, I’ve also been commissioning blog posts from two non-fiction guests via theirpublicists. I feel that one advantage of the festival blog is how it allows us to dip into a wide range of upcoming events in advance, as we decide which events to book. Lucky for us all, our chair Meg has an excellent knack of spotting newsworthy trends months in advance, and these two books could not be more topical right now, with both authors recently appearing in the national news as expert commentators.

‘Watch this space to see who they are!’

Kerry Addison, sponsor co-ordinator

‘Recently, I have been working with our festival sponsors, checking their logo and company information is correct for our website and programme, and keeping them informed about our fantastic line-up.
‘We recently joined LinkedIn which is a good way of keeping in touch with our sponsors and supporters.  We can let others in the business community know who our loyal supporters and sponsors are, and in time we hope it will be a way of attracting more sponsorship to build on our work at the festival. We have a small but growing band of followers. If you use Linkedin, please do search for us!
‘I have also been posting updates about this year’s authors and events, hopefully reaching a wider audience.’

In the next of our series, this year’s guest Tracy Chevalier tells Steph Mackentyre why she doesn’t write novels in her home study

 

‘I have a little study, a very small room in our house, and it looks out over a very tiny garden. You would think this is where I would write, but actually I hate writing at a desk.

‘I write by hand in a notebook and then I type it into the computer at the end of the day, and so I end up gravitating to the sofa in the living room, curled up in one corner writing.

‘I often feel a bit guilty, like, ‘Tracy, you have a study, you should really be using it’, but the desk is for work work, like paying bills and reading things that I have to edit, and using the computer, whereas writing for me, writing novels, is very much about pen to paper.

‘It takes me longer to write than to type. I think a sentence out slowly, and that seems to fit the time that it takes me to write it out by hand so I really prefer that.’ ‘I can’t really write in cafes the way other writers do. Sometimes I go to the British Library and write, and that’s really good because you’ve got all these people around you, really silent. Everyone’s really focused, like one big community focused on work –and that can be very helpful – but mainly it’s on the sofa in the living room.’

Tracy Chevalier will discuss her new novel, The Glass Maker, with Esther Freud on 28 June at 1pm

Julia Jones’s new book Stars To Steer By celebrates women’s involvement with sailing and the sea in the 20th century. To celebrate International Women’s Day, Julia, a guest at this year’s festival, tells us what inspired her to write about this subject

Through much of the 20th century, recognition for women in sailing was rare. When I took over the book pages at Yachting Monthly magazine, I inherited a popular feature called ‘A Book at Bunk Time’, for which an extract is chosen from any sailing book the editor thinks readers would enjoy. Of the 46 titles previously chosen, only two were by women. I was determined to change that proportion. I leafed through issue after issue of the 20^th century magazine finding almost no articles by women, no letters from women, no reviews of books by women. Did that mean that 20^th century women didn’t go sailing? Weren’t interested in boats? Or couldn’t write?

I didn’t need to wait for Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women or for Mary Ann Sieghart’s The Authority Gap to know this absence of women was both unfair and untrue.

I was born midway through the 20^th century in 1954 and was taken sailing from carry cot to teenage years. I’ve a sneaking suspicion I might even have been conceived on board… my mother and father had sailed their small yacht to take part in the July 1953 Coronation Review and had remained afloat for much of August.  I was born the following April. There were plenty of other girls and women on the River Deben when I was growing up, but somehow it was men who dominated the sport, owned the yachts, ran the clubs, wrote the books and articles.

The public face of 20^th century British society was male. Men ran the government, the professions, owned most of the national assets. Sailing seemed to take that imbalance to extremes, with women often actively excluded. In 1876, Anna Brassey and her husband Thomas had started their circumnavigation from the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes where he was a member. Women were not admitted as members until 2013, almost 200 years.

Anna wrote a book about their 11-month voyage, which was published in 1878 and became an international bestseller. Had it been published a decade earlier, before the introduction of the Married Women’s Property Act (1870), her earnings would have belonged to her husband. The book’s success was unlikely to have made any material difference to Anna Brassey’s life – the Brasseys were already rich – yet successful authorship brought her deep personal satisfaction, gave her a sense of purpose and ensured that she was acknowledged and remembered, in the sailing world at least.

As society slowly changed, with the achievement of women’s suffrage, with the opening up of education, access to the professions, the concept of equal pay for equal work, changes in women’s control over their own bodies, so sailing changed.

The century ended with public delight at the achievement of Ellen MacArthur, who finished second in the extraordinarily difficult and prestigious Vendée Globe, at the age of 24. Tiny, determined, successful, four years later she broke the speed record for a single-handed, non-stop circumnavigation. And there were so many others.

In Stars To Steer By, I wanted to write about those women in the 20^th century who wanted to take the helm into their own hands, to be in charge of their own adventures. The women who are the ‘stars’ of my book are truly inspirational for their individual tenacity in the face of social opposition, as well as for their courage and skill at sea.

Julia Jones will be discussing Stars To Steer By on June 29^th at 4.30pm. International Women’s Day 2025 is on March 8^th.

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!