Fantastic Line Up For Chiswick Book Festival 2015

Wide range of speakers including Vince Cable, John Torode, and Max Hastings

Tickets are now on sale for the 7th Chiswick Book Festival, which will take place from September 10th to 14th 2015.

More than 50 top writers will be speaking on a wide range of topics, including history, politics and economics, fiction, crime, memoir, biography, sport, music, food and books for children and young adults.

Speakers include former cabinet minister Vince Cable, Masterchef presenter John Torode, actress and comedian Helen Lederer and Mary ‘Queen of Shops’ Portas will join established authors Max Hastings, A N Wilson and Ferdinand Mount; Poirot actor Hugh Fraser; novelists James MacManus and Rosamund Lupton; and Sally Green, winner of the teen category in the 2015 Waterstones Children’s Books Prize.

Chiswickbuzz tv have interviewed Festival Director Torin Douglas

Other authors and experts speaking at the Festival include Cathy Rentzenbrink, Matt Haig, Colette McBeth, Tim Marshall, S J I Holliday, Sonia Purnell, David Shreeve, Bonnie MacBird, Peter Oborne, Sandy Burnett, Sue Elliott, Steve Humphries, Jo Pratt, Michael Parker, Graham Holderness, Caroline Goyder, Helena Coggan, Sarah Leipciger, Andrew Gimson, Martin Rowson, David Miller, Andrew Biswell, Stephen Cooper and more.

Several of the summer’s most talked-about books will be discussed by their authors. They include The Last Act of Love, Cathy Rentzenbrink’s “brilliant, moving memoir” about the terrible impact of her younger brother’s road accident; Matt Haig’s bestselling memoir Reasons To Stay Alive; and Sonia Purnell’s “eye-opening and engrossing” biography of Clementine Churchill.

Rosamund Lupton’s much-lauded The Quality of Silence has just been selected as The Observer’s Thriller of the Month; and two new books about the BBC will be discussed and debated - Roger Mosey’s Getting Out Alive and Charlotte Higgins’ This New Noise, along with Jean Seaton’s ‘Pinkoes & Traitors’, which was published in the spring.

The Chiswick Book Festival is based at St Michael & All Angels Church and Parish Hall, two minutes walk from Turnham Green tube station in west London, W4. Other events are held at Chiswick House, Chiswick Library and the Tabard Theatre in Bath Road, W4.

The Festival will open on the evening of Thursday September 10th at Chiswick House and Gardens. That week marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the London Blitz and five authors will talk about the Blitz, its effect and its importance in our history: Sonia Purnell (First Lady: The Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill); James MacManus (Sleep in Peace Tonight, a novel set in the London Blitz); and Sue Elliott and Steve Humphries (Britain’s Greatest Generation, from the BBC Two series). The panel will be chaired by Diana Preston (A Higher Form of Killing, about new forms of warfare in World War I).

Sir Max Hastings

On Friday evening September 11th, at 5pm, Sally Green will talk about Half Bad and Half Wild, her ‘brilliant and compelling’ books for teens about witches, which won Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2015. Later, at 7pm, Sir Max Hastings returns to St Michael & All Angels Church for the first talk in a nationwide tour about his new book, The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-45.

On Saturday morning, September 12 th, there will be a special Alice in Wonderland Extravaganza for children, to celebrate the 150 th anniversary of the book’s publication, including craft activities, a fancy dress competition and a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, with special interactive storytelling by poet Oscar Kolkowski as the Mad Hatter. That will be followed by the prize ceremony for the Festival’s annual Young Person’s Poetry Competition. Later, at Chiswick Library, Fran Clark will talk about her new book for very young children, Brett Bear and the Cheeky Chipmunk.

On Saturday evening, Mary Portas will be interviewed by Jane Garvey of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour about her moving memoir about her early life, Shop Girl.

On Sunday September 13th, A N Wilson makes another welcome appearance at St Michael & All Angels talking about his latest book, The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible.

And on Monday September 14th at Chiswick Library, the Crime Readers Association author of the month S J I Holliday will speak about Black Wood with Louise Voss (The Venus Trap).

There’ll also be a feast of crime, including three ‘Crime Watch’ sessions on Sunday afternoon, with Colette McBeth, Erin Kelly and Jane Casey from the new ‘Killer Women’ writers group, chaired by Laura Wilson; crime ‘professionals’ such as Detective Constable Lisa Cutts and criminology lecturer Diana Bretherick; and Hercule Poirot’s Captain Hastings - actor Hugh Fraser, who has written his first crime novel, Harm – talking with Hollywood screenwriter Bonnie MacBird. On Monday at Chiswick Library, Crime Readers Association author of the month S J I Holliday will speak with Louise Voss.

Chiswick schoolgirl Helena Coggan, whose first novel The Catalyst has been published to huge acclaim, will discuss how she wrote the first draft at school at the age of 13 and what happened next. There’ll be a session about Anthony Burgess in Chiswick with Andrew Biswell and Graham Holderness; another about the first Rugby World Cup at the end of the First World War with Stephen Cooper; discussions on the business of books, e-books and creative writing; and much more.

There will also be an exhibition on ‘Chiswick, the Blitz and the V2’, compiled by the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society, showing how Chiswick was affected by the Second World War. It will include images and documents about the bomb damage to Hogarth’s House and the first V2 missile which landed on Staveley Road, near Chiswick House; and extracts from A Vicarage in the Blitz, a book based on letters written from St Nicholas’s vicarage by the river, beautifully illustrated by Anthea Craigmyle. You can read an interview with Anthea which was published in chiswickw4.com in 2013 when the book was launched.

The Chiswick Book Festival is a non-profit-making community event, raising money for reading-related charities and St Michael & All Angels Church, which organises the Festival.

This year, the Festival will support a new charity, The Doorstep Library - which brings the magic of reading directly to the homes of children in deprived parts of west London, through a network of volunteer readers. Announcing the the decision, the director of the Chiswick Book Festival Torin Douglas said: "Doorstep Library is a small charity that is doing great work with children. We hope we can help it to raise money and awareness, so it can attract more volunteer readers. It has a lively new website and is building very good contacts with local authors."

This year’s Festival will also raise money for: - RNIB Talking Books Service and Books for Children, supporting blind and partially-sighted people. Over the past six years, the Festival has sponsored the creation of Talking Books by previous CBF speakers Claire Tomalin, Rosamund Lupton and Andy McNab. Its most recent Talking Book was Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford, which is partly set in Chiswick; InterAct Stroke Support, which employs actors to provide a reading service for stroke patients at Charing Cross Hospital.

August 18, 2015