'Nowadays, little separates the literati from the glitterati': Britain's literary festivals are this season's hot tickets

The world’s largest literary festival is held, unsurprisingly, in India. Each January, Jaipur welcomes the great and the good to the Rajasthani capital for conversations between Nobel laureates and Pulitzer winners. Yet it is Britain that remains synonymous with the 'lit fest'; there are so many, in fact, that you could feasibly attend one nearly every three days.

Cheltenham, which will celebrate its 76th edition from October 10–19, remains the proud original: a blueprint for the likes of Oxford, Cliveden and Hay, which Bill Clinton once called ‘the Woodstock of the mind’.

A lit fest is a smart affair, in every sense. In his memoir Experience, the late Martin Amis recounts an episode in which his son, Louis, asked him: ‘What class are we?’ ‘We’re outside all that,’ he replied. ‘We’re the intelligentsia.’ Nowadays, little separates the literati from the glitterati: lit fest attendees dress up, stand a little taller and pose for Tatler's Bystander. Although Martin was, by all accounts, a regular both on lit fest billings and in the society pages, I doubt even he could have anticipated quite how starry such events would become. To boot, 2023’s Hay-on-Wye headliners were not authors but A-list artists, Dua Lipa and Stormzy.

In an era where reading rates are on the decline, there is merit to attracting such names. They draw an audience interested, if not purely in books, then in the Arts and culture more widely. They generate discussion, chatter, gossip and column inches. It’s a far cry from the lit-fest-ageddon many had decried last summer, after Hay, Cheltenham and Edinburgh were forced by pressure groups to sever ties with their sponsor Baillie Gifford over fossil fuel-related investments.

If anything, literary festivals are thriving. From October 11–12, the country’s most glamorous returns to Cliveden House in Berkshire, with speakers including Sir Salman Rushdie, Tina Brown and Richard E. Grant. The sponsor? None other than Chanel. Up North, Ilkley Literature Festival in West Yorkshire — founded in 1973 by W. H. Auden — resumes in two days’ time and runs until October 19, with speakers including Nick Clegg, Simon Armitage and Jay Rayner.

Over in Wells-next-the-Sea, Dr Victoria Rangeley-Wilson is about to launch the second edition of the North Norfolk Festival of Literature and Landscape. Held over the weekend, it will host talks from Richard Mabey, Patrick Galbraith and Alan Hollinghurst. The festival is focused primarily on Nature writing, a genre that is unironically ‘quite urban in its origin’, its founder notes. ‘The goal is to give writers, who often lead solitary lives,’ she explains, ‘an opportunity to meet their fans and inspire them with Norfolk’s unparalleled conservation projects.’

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