The next Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival will be 21-23 September 2012

Box Office opens July 30, 2012

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Some of the writers who appeared at the 2011 Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival included …

• Hilary Mantel • Carol Ann Duffy • Gillian Clarke • Mavis Cheek
• AL Kennedy • Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall • Josceline Dimbleby
• Michael Morpurgo • Sir Roy Strong • Robin Hanbury-Tennison

Visit the 2011 Festival Photo Gallery here…

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Part of the Literary Festival’s ethos is to entertain the whole community, and to this end, the programme includes pre-school storybook reading, a poetry workshop, poetry recitals involving local schools, book sales, an art talk about a celebrated book illustrator, and even a walking tour with a literary flavour around Budleigh Salterton.

We have posted (below) a short video of highlights from our 2011 Festival.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival is supported by:

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• Everys Solicitors • Palmers Whitton and Laing • The Tolkien Trust •
• Norman Family Charitable Trust • Creative Engine Web & Marketing •
• The Farm Marketing Communications • Devon County Council •
• Arts & Culture at the University of Exeter • Simcoe House •
• Blackwell Publishers • Budleigh Salterton Library •
• Budleigh Salterton Tourist Information Centre •
• Budleigh Salterton Town Council •
• Councillor Christine Channon • Michael Jackaman • P.J. White •

…and other Literary Festival Friends and supporters who have kindly sponsored or contributed to the Festival.

Other large UK Literary Festivals & Literature Festivals in South West England include:
The Telegraph Ways With Words Literary Festival at Dartington Hall
The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival
Port Eliot Festival
Bath Literary Festival

We also recommend Wordquest Devon – an opportunity for people to immerse themselves in Devon’s literature while exploring the county’s dramatic landscapes.

Looking forward to welcoming you to the 2012 Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival.

Literary Festival UK

Literary Festival Devon

Poet and playwright, Lemn Sissay MBE will be joining our 2012 Literary Festival in Budleigh Salterton.

Lemn Sissay MBE is the first of five poets commissioned for the Olympic Park (the other poets include Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate who came to our Festival last year). For the Olympic site, Lemn has written a poem about the women and girls of The Bryant & May Match Factory, inspired by a campaigning article written by Annie Besant in 1888.

Lemn is associate artist at Europe’s largest Arts Centre, Southbank Centre. In 2009 he received an honorary doctorate from Huddersfield University and in 2010 he was awarded an MBE for his services to literature.

All about Lemn Sissay: www.lemnsissay.com

Lemn is the author of five books of poetry and has read on stages throughout the world.  He was awarded the 2010 Travelling Award Scholarship from the Society of Authors.  His play Something Dark, directed by John McGrath (artistic director of National Theatre Wales), won an RIMA award and has been performed in many countries.

Box Office opens July 30, 2012

Hilary Mantel will be joining our 2012 Literary Festival in Budleigh Salterton

We are especially honoured to have Hilary Mantel CBE, our President, to speak at this year’s Festival. She has been deluged with invitations to speak at other literary festivals and book tours around the world but has remained loyally attached to her new home town, Budleigh Salterton.

Hilary is the author of the hugely acclaimed novel Wolf Hall which won the 2010 Man Booker Prize.  She has finished one sequel, Bring up the Bodies, which focuses on the downfall of Anne Boleyn, published on 10th May 2012 and is now hard at work on the third of the trilogy – The Mirror and the Light.

The BBC's Nick Higham went to a Tudor house in Devon to speak to Hilary Mantel. Click to see the interview.

She also writes reviews and essays for national newspapers and literary magazines including the London Review of Books. Amongst her previous books are Beyond Black (2005) which was short-listed for the Orange Prize and Giving up the Ghost (2003) which was named the 2004 Book of the Year by Mind.

Hilary was born in Glossop, Derbyshire and went to school in Cheshire before attending the London School of Economics in 1970.  She later transferred to the University of Sheffield and graduated in Jurisprudence in 1973. She has won numerous literature prizes including the Hawthornden, Cheltenham and the Walter Scott Prize as well as receiving honorary doctorates from five universities including Exeter and Sheffield.

Box Office opens July 30, 2012

Kathy Lette, that chatterbox of a best-selling author, will be joining our 2012 Literary Festival in Budleigh Salterton.

In 2010, Kathy Lette appeared at our festival and was by universal consent judged to be a knock-out. It was not a difficult decision to invite her back but we are fortunate that she accepted our invitation.

For those who have not experienced her event, she produces a rapid fire of neat insights punctuated by outrageous puns and non-literary references. If you haven’t heard her before, book early! She radically upsets one’s expectations of authors’ presentations.

All about Kathy Lette: www.kathylette.com

Bold, brash and very clever, Kathy Lette comes to Budleigh Salterton to talk about her latest novel The Boy Who Fell To Earth (2012), an energetic tale of the trials and tribulations of a single mother and her son Merlin, who has Aspergers. Join Lette in conversation with Professor Helen Taylor, talking about her latest book, her writing life and loves, and the very real challenges remaining for women in a 21st century world, not to mention pregnancy and mothering survival tips, hot flushes, getting down and dirty with George Clooney and Princes William and Harry, and hiding Julian Assange in the attic.

Kathy Lette is Australian and first achieved success with a novel, Puberty Blues, co-authored with her friend Gabrielle Carey.  When she grew up a little, she became a newspaper columnist and sitcom writer but returned to the novel form with Girl’s Night Out in 1988 and has since written many novels including ‘How to Kill your Husband (and other handy household hints)’.

Box Office opens July 30, 2012

Antarctic expert and winner of numerous literary prizes as well as the US Congress Antarctic Service Medal… Meredith Hooper will be joining our 2012 Literary Festival in Budleigh Salterton.

Meredith Hooper is a lecturer, historian, Antarctic expert and full-time writer of non-fiction and fiction for children and adults.  Her non-fiction books include The Ferocious Summer: Palmer’s Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica (2007) and the Longest Winter: Scott’s Other Heroes (2010).

A review in March 2012 discussed The Longest Winter; “The intensely human story of their miraculous survival in an ice cave is brought to life in Meredith Hooper’s gripping book which separates the parallel tragedy of Scott and his companions and allows these other heroes to take their rightful place in history.” (Pam Norfolk, Clitheroe Advertiser and Times, 28/03/2012).

Meredith grew up in Australia and came to the UK to study for a post graduate history degree in Oxford. Having spent three summers living in Antarctica as a writer, she was chosen to record the work of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions and the U.S. National Science Polar Programme. Meredith has been in the almost unique position of writing about the conditions and the hostile environment which she has experienced at first hand.

Box Office opens July 30, 2012

English historian and academic, Peter Hennessy will be joining our 2012 Literary Festival in Budleigh Salterton.

Peter Hennessy – Professor the Lord Peter Hennessy of Nympsfield – has watched several generations of ministers grope their way around Whitehall. In the 1970s he was a lobby reporter for the Financial Times, and The Times’s Whitehall correspondent; in the 80s, a journalist for the Economist, New Statesman and Independent; and since 1989, he’s been a professor of government and modern history – spending much of that period at London’s Queen Mary University.

Every new generation of ministers arrives in Whitehall suspicious of the civil service machine, says Peter Hennessy. “Ministers arrive brimful of ideology and hope… They’ve absorbed the Crossman diaries and Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister whole, and believe there’s this silky conspiracy just waiting to envelop them and kill them with kindness and tender loving care.” Some of the “more ideologically inflamed politicians”, he continues, “…believe that it’s even more sinister than that, and there’s a centrist conspiracy….That’s all balls, you know,” he says. “The notion that there’s an organised conspiracy is quite absurd.”

His publications include Never Again Britain 1945-51 (1992) ; The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution (2000)  and  The Secret State Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010(2010). The Spectator review www.spectator.co.uk/books/learning-to-live-with-the-bomb quotes Hennessy’s story of the encounter between Khrushchev and the British Ambassador, Frank Roberts. The Soviet leader asked how many H-bombs Roberts thought would be needed to wipe out the UK. ‘Six’, he replied. Khrushchev chided him for his pessimism. He said that ‘optimists’ estimated it would take nine — but reassured him with a twinkle that the Soviet General Staff… had earmarked several scores of bombs for use against the UK so that the Soviet Union had a higher opinion of the UK’s resistance capacity than the UK itself.

His talk which is scheduled for Sunday 23 Sept 2012 will be titled “Writing the History of One’s Own Time”. Come along and listen to a speaker whom the Telegraph (10/08/2010) described as “…a humane and thoughtful historian, who has done more than any other to illuminate the dusty corridors of power…”

Box Office opens July 30, 2012

Film academic Ginette Vincendau will be joining our 2012 Literary Festival in Budleigh Salterton.

Brigitte Bardot... "And God Created Woman" (1956)

Brigitte Bardot took the world by storm with ‘And God Created Woman’ in 1956.  She projected a truly ground-breaking image of hedonism and sexual freedom.

Despite her brief film career, her glorious youthful image continues to sell books, handbags and clothes. Bardot continues to be often in the news for her controversial, but deeply felt struggle for animal rights.

Ginette Vincendeau is Professor of Film at King’s College University of London and an internationally known and respected authority on French cinema, who combines fine intelligence and analytical depth with passion for her subject and an ability to share her enjoyment in it.

She writes for publications including ‘Sight & Sound’, ‘Positif’ and ‘Screen’. Her many books on French cinema include ‘Stars and Stardom in French Cinema’ (2000) and ‘Jean-Pierre Melville, An American in Paris’ (2003). She is Series Editor of Tauris’s Cine-files French Film Guides series and author of the Cine-file on ‘La Haine’.

In her new book on Bardot, Ginette Vincendeau traces the enduring fascination of the star from her beginnings in early 1950s France to today, reflecting on her cinematic, cultural and political significance.  Her talk will be illustrated with photographs and film extracts.

Box Office opens July 30, 2012

There can be few readers of contemporary literature who have not been moved or amused by Wendy Cope’s work.  Her poems have become absorbed into the national consciousness – think of the phrase, “Bloody men are like…”

Indeed last year at the Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival, Carol Ann Duffy started her wonderful presentation (with Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales) with the remark, “You have to wait four hundred years for a woman Poet Laureate and then three come along at once…”.  The audience broke into delighted laughter.

Wendy’s poetry appeals to a wide range of people.  Underlying the cheerful,   self-deprecatory humour, there is a sensitive and poetical view that neatly catches the misfortunes and misapprehensions that are universal.   Her collections of poetry Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986) and Serious Concerns (1992) both sold more than 100,000 copies establishing a phenomenal readership for her work, continued by If I don’t know (2001) and Two Cures for Love (2008).

Amongst the more illuminating reviews that her work has received, we noted, ‘Whatever else these poems are, they are not light. Like the poems of gratitude for “the years of warmth and love and Christmas trees”, and those about seeing friends who live far away, perhaps for the last time, they are written with the deceptive simplicity of all Cope’s work, but are also electric with emotion that ranges from anger and fear to sometimes wounded love.’ (Christina Patterson, Independent, 8/04/2011).

Wendy Cope has commented on her latest collection in the following terms, “As for the jokes: “Possibly I’ve become less funny as I’ve been happier… There is some humour in Family Values. I don’t want everyone to think it’s not going to make them laugh. But there are quite a lot of poems there that aren’t funny at all.” (Tom Payne, Telegraph, 28/3/2011)

Box Office opens July 30, 2012