Blog by Festival director Torin Douglas, July 2023
When we launched the Chiswick Book Festival 15 years ago, my instinct was to start slowly, and grow over time. My fellow organisers – Jacks Thomas and her husband Malcolm Edwards – had other ideas.
Extremely well-connected, their idea of starting slowly was to invite Lady Antonia Fraser, Anthony Horowitz, Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Frayn to take part. All duly spoke at St Michael & All Angels, with other writers such as the Windrush poet James Berry, and we were on our way.
Since then, the Festival has gone from strength to strength, bringing together top writers and their audiences in aid of reading charities. I’m delighted that Dame Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Frayn (in his 90th birthday week) are returning to mark our 15th Festival, along with a host of other well-known names, including Alan Titchmarsh, Clive Myrie, Nadiya Hussain, AN Wilson, Daisy Goodwin, Gavin Esler, Peter Frankopan, David Baddiel, Shaparak Khorsandi, Tim Marshall, Rory Cellan-Jones, Jane Garvey, Phyllis Logan, Janet Ellis, Marcus Brigstocke and Jess Phillips MP.
Each year we offer sessions on fiction, history, politics, crime, biography and memoir, health and wellbeing, food and drink, and children’s books – and this year we also have great sessions on gardening and rock music and several local history walks.
With Jo James, our programme director, I also try to pair authors and interviewers creatively, to stimulate lively sessions. Among our ‘perfect pairings’ this year are these:
- Garden writer and broadcaster Alan Titchmarsh will speak with Rosie Fyles, head of gardens at Chiswick House, about his new book on Chatsworth, sister estate to Chiswick; both were owned by the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who persuaded Joseph Paxton to leave Chiswick to create his new garden at Chatsworth.
- Thursday September 7th at Chiswick House
- Festival favourite AN Wilson, our most frequent speaker over the years, will talk to his friend Daisy Goodwin, about his memoirs Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises. Their sparkling conversation about ITV’s Victoria at Chiswick House was a highlight of the 2016 Chiswick Book Festival.
Friday September 8th in St Michael & All Angels Church
- Comedian Marcus Brigstocke and MP Jess Phillips enjoy challenging the system – and each other. Join them for an entertaining hour of books, badinage and banter
Friday September 8th in the Andrew Lloyd Webber Theatre at ArtsEd
- Catherine Ashton was the EU’s first representative for Foreign Affairs and Security. Simon McDonald rose to be Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office after a life in diplomacy. Both are now life peers and have written new books about modern diplomacy and foreign affairs.
- Saturday September 9th in the Boston Room, George IV
- Baddiel and the Bishop: In The God Desire, comedian and author David Baddiel argues that our intense desire for God to exist proves that he doesn’t. He joins Emma Iveson, Bishop of Kensington, whose new book is Failure: What Jesus said about Sin, Mistakes and Messing Stuff Up. They are chaired by Fr Kevin Morris, Vicar of St Michael & All Angels.
Sunday September 9th in St Michael & All Angels Church
- Essie Fox’s latest Gothic novel The Fascination has scenes set in Linden House, home of the ‘Chiswick Poisoner’ (now demolished, but remembered in Linden Gardens) and reached the Sunday Times hardback fiction top ten. She’s paired with Kate Griffin, whose Gothic novel Fyneshade is a Sunday Times Historical Fiction Book of 2023.
- Sunday September 9th in Chiswick Cinema, Screen 2
- David Hepworth and Mark Ellen have been talking and writing about music together for 40 years, in magazines like Smash Hits, Mojo and The Word and on radio and TV programmes like Rock On and Whistle Test. They’ll talk about David’s new book Abbey Road: The World’s Most Famous Recording Studio.
Sunday September 10th in St Michael & All Angels Church
As usual, we’ll feature lots of local authors and local history sessions, boosted this year by the new edition of our Chiswick Writers Trail, featuring 36 notable dramatists, novelists and poets. We’ll celebrate WB Yeats, in the centenary year of his Novel Prize for Literature, and it’s also the centenary of Warwick Draper’s history of Chiswick, so we’ll discuss Chiswick people and stories with Val Bott and James Wisdom of the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society.
The 15th Chiswick Book Festival will take place from September 6th to 13th 2023 in a variety of Chiswick venues. Tickets are on sale from July 22nd via the Festival website: www.chiswickbookfestival.net.