Uncategorized

Hello booklovers,

We are extending another big thank you to our festival sponsors – today we are celebrating one of our bronze sponsors, Jackamans Solicitors.

Jackamans Solicitors is one of East Anglia’s longest established legal firms. Jackamans provides a comprehensive range of legal services to individuals and businesses with approachable lawyers and staff who are experts in their fields and who really care about their clients.

Whether you need help with moving house or moving on, Jackamans have the right expert to help you. Jackamans will talk to you in plain language and guarantee personal attention. You can give them a ring on 01394 279636 or check out their website here www.jackamans.co.uk.

This year Jackamans are very kindly sponsoring our live stream interview with Harriet Tyce.

A great big bookish thank you,

The Felixstowe Book Festival Team

My three books to take to a desert island would be…

I’m currently keeping myself busy communicating the science/maths behind the COVID-19 out break: https://kityates.com/public-engagement/. It helps that the last chapter of the Maths of Life and Death is all about how to predict, understand and stop epidemics.

Hello booklovers,

In the build up to our 2020 Online Festival we would like to say a huge thank you to our sponsors whose support is invaluable to our festival.

We’ll begin with our Gold Sponsor Kingsfleet Wealth. 

Kingsfleet Wealth have longstanding links with Felixstowe and have been valued supporters of Felixstowe Book Festival since its inception in 2013.

For 10 years Kingsfleet Wealth has served the people of Suffolk by providing Independent Financial Advice to individuals, trustees and Charities.  Kingsfleet Wealth are one of very few Chartered Financial Planning firms in the County and have pleasure in employing Suffolk people, using Suffolk suppliers and supporting Suffolk charities and enterprises.

This year Kingsfleet Wealth are kindly sponsoring our live stream interviews with George Alagiah, who will be discussing his debut novel The Burning Land and Nick Cottam  who will be chatting about the wonderful Life on the Deben.

You can find more information about Kingsfleet wealth through their website here: www.kingsfleetwealth.co.uk

A great big bookish thank you,

The Felixstowe Book Festival Team

Hello booklovers,

With so many of us enduring lockdown isolation, literary folk have turned to books and reading as a source of comfort and company.

We thought we would extend the isolation reading theme further. Here at FbF we teamed up with several authors, who would have joined us for our original 2020 festival, with a mission to compile a ‘castaway library’. 

We asked them which books they would take with them if they were abandoned alone on a desert island. You will be intrigued to find out their responses…

Our first contributor is Edward Parnell who takes us away to his castaway library…

I always struggle with questions like this about which books I’d take on my desert island, as I suspect the books I might think of as being my favourites wouldn’t necessarily be the ones I’d want for company in that castaway situation. And, of course, different texts mean different things to us at different parts of our lives, which always seems to make any choice harder…

Given that, my first pick is a book by one of my favourite authors, though it’s not my absolute favourite of his works (that would be his most-famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five). It does seem, however, the most appropriate of his titles to be stuck with on a desert island – and it is a very fine work in its own right. It’s Kurt Vonnegut’s 1985 novel Galápagos, a book in which, a million years into the future, the human race has evolved into seal-like creatures, stranded on the islands made famous as the place where Darwin began to unpin the secrets of evolution. It’s a clever, funny novel – structurally inventive and, above all, full of Vonnegut’s characteristic humanity. It also feels very prescient given our current slide towards environmental and social catastrophes that our ‘Big Brains’ seem incapable of addressing.

For my second book it seems appropriate to choose a collection of ghost stories given the subject matter of my most-recent book, Ghostland. With little to do on my island I expect I’ll have plenty of time to try to decode the strange alchemy at work in the stories of one of the masters of the form. I’m tempted to pick a collection by Walter de la Mare or Robert Aickman, two writers whose eerie tales often have an dreamlike air of psychological ambiguity. But, in the end it’s difficult to look beyond the more-obvious terrors present throughout Curious Warnings: The Great Ghost Stories of M. R. James (Jo Fletcher Books, 2012) – as the Victorian-born Cambridge academic is still, on balance, my favourite practitioner of the ghost story. Though how much comfort I’ll get reading about his lonely, demon-stalked Edwardian protagonists while I’m stranded on that faraway isle is perhaps a moot point…

My final book is going to be a practical choice. Whether my island is an isolated, wind-blasted rock somewhere in the Atlantic, or (hopefully) an idyllic coral cay in the depths of the Pacific, as a keen birder one of the things I’m going to do to kill time is watch out for passing seabirds. Given that, having to hand a reference book that covers all the possibilities I might see seems like a good plan, so I’ll go with Oceanic Birds of the World: A Photo Guide by Steve Howell and Kirk Zufelt (Princeton, 2019). I just hope I’m allowed to take a pair of binoculars or a telescope with me too, else my views of those passing petrels and shearwaters aren’t going to amount to much when I write home via the traditional message-in-a-bottle method.

Ed’s most-recent book is the narrative non-fiction Ghostland for William Collins (October 2019), and he is also the author of The Listeners (winner of the 2014 Rethink New Novels Prize). Ed is the director of the biennial Wymondham Words literature festival.

Hello booklovers,

Less than a week to go until our Online Book Festival! Where has the time gone? Needless to say we’re all very excited to launch our festival via a very different platform – we hope you are looking forward to our Live interviews, author Q&As and snapshots into a day in the life of an author in lockdown.

As an extra treat this week, keep your eyes on our website for a new blog feature, the Castaway Library. To some extent we have all experienced some form of isolation over the past few months. Grabbing hold of that theme… imagine if you were isolated and totally alone, not surrounded by the comforting streets and spires that populate our town. Imagine if you were stranded on a desert island, with nothing but three books to keep you entertained. Which books would you pick?

We posed this very question to several authors who would have, under normal circumstances, been guests at our original 2020 festival, and recieved some totally fascinating responses. Look out for the castaway libraries of Edward Parnell, Kit Yates, Louise Millar and Helen McCarthy over the course of the next few days – you might get inspired to read some new titles yourself!

Bookish best,

The Felixstowe Book Festival Team

Hello booklovers,

Our online festival is nearly here, the excitement is almost proving too much! We hope you are all ready and rearing to go for a weekend’s viewing of fascinating talks and videos. Take a look below for the full programme…

We have a whole host of Live Interviews, pre-recorded author Q&As, plus video insights into the day in the life of an author in lockdown. What more could you wish for? And for our younger festival fans we have drawalongs and story readings, such fun!

Don’t forget to take a look at our guide to viewing our Live events here: https://felixstowebookfestival.co.uk/how-to-view-our-fbf-live-stream-videos. 

For anyone not using Facebook, head to the Online section of our website over the weekend where you will be able to view the festival. You can find this here: https://felixstowebookfestival.co.uk/online

Thank you as ever for your support at this tricky time, we do hope you enjoy our 2020 Online festival!

Bookish best,

the Felixstowe Book Festival Team x