For the past 12 years, on one long spring weekend, the population of Chipping Norton would swell, the area’s hotels and B&Bs, taxis, pubs and cafes busied by the arrival of authors, publishers, agents and publicists. Writers made visits to local schools. Audience members puttered between the theatre and the town hall, the library, the bookshop and the Methodist church.
The decision to end ChipLitFest, the town’s annual literary festival, was announced last week. It was a lack of “confidence at this point in the year that we’ve got the resources to meet the cost of production,” its director, Jenny Dee, told the Bookseller. And then there was the fact that publishers were beginning to question the wisdom of even sending their authors to such small festivals. That Chipping Norton’s largest venue had a capacity of just 220 meant there was a limit to the money anyone could expect to make.
Since the launch of Cheltenham literature festival 75 years ago, the idea of the book festival has been embedded in the British cultural landscape. Its calendar runs, roughly, from Faversham in February, to Folkestone in November. It encompasses small-town gatherings and huge, corporate-sponsored events, with programmes that range from new poets to prize-winning novelists, via TV chefs and podcast hosts.
In recent years, that idea has begun to shift – the broader spoken-word scene has grown more polished, authors and audiences more diverse, and events both more technologically involved and more socially conscious. Morning yoga and creative-writing workshops have been added to festival bills. Outreach programmes have been extended into local communities, and livestreams have introduced far-flung online audiences. In many ways, the value of such events is more evident than ever.
But alongside these developments have come a number of financial constraints, of the kind that felled ChipLit. The basic costs of running a festival – energy, accommodation, transportation, administration and advertising – have all risen sharply, while potential audiences have less disposable income. Festival organisers have been faced with the conundrum of how to keep afloat – programming celebrity speakers at the expense of emerging literary talent, for example, raising ticket prices or seeking corporate sponsorship.
Each apparent solution brings consequences, disrupting the delicate ecosystem of the book festival. Sponsorship, in particular, is in short supply and not without ramification. This year came the news that the investment management company Baillie Gifford would be ending its sponsorship of nine British book festivals, including Hay, Edinburgh and Cheltenham, following a campaign by Fossil Free Books (FFB) that was widely supported by authors. In May, 200 of them, including Sally Rooney, Naomi Klein and Max Porter, signed an FFB statement demanding that Baillie Gifford divest from companies involved in the fossil fuel industry and those with links to the Israeli state.
The situation has now grown critical enough that the recent Ilkley literature festival programmed an “industry insight event” on the “present and future of literature festivals and the UK’s literary ecology”, which looked at the many challenges currently facing the industry.
“I don’t know if there has been a misunderstanding about the power balance in the relationship between a festival and its corporate sponsor,” Ilkley festival’s director, Erica Morris, says of the Baillie Gifford controversy. “But the people who’ve lost out have been literature festivals and writers.”
From the perspective of the publishing industry, the appeal of the book festival is a simple one: to sell more books. A festival’s impact, however, is not always a simple thing to quantify. “It’s expensive to send people up and down the country, so you have to measure whether it’s worthwhile,” says Millie Seaward, head of publicity at Dialogue Books. “But it’s hard to measure the long tail of these things.”
The obvious yardstick is sales through the festival bookshop, but even those figures can be blurry. “People will go to a few events at a festival,” Seaward says. “Each ticket will cost, say, £7 to £20. If they’re going to a number of events someone might not buy the book on the day. But they might pre-order the paperback, or buy the audiobook, or go on Amazon after the festival.” She points out that if a festival has a media sponsor, they might also be minded to support an author’s work and provide coverage in the future – leading to further sales.
It can be a tough call to make. Book festival appearances are not especially lucrative for authors. Many can expect a speaking fee of £150, with few book sales at the event, for which they may have taken time off work, or travelled great distances. Still, Seaward sees a value that extends beyond pure economics. “One of the reasons I wanted to do this job is because I love festivals,” she says. “They offer such a great space for discussion and bringing authors into public consciousness.”
The history of those who have set up and programmed book festivals is pleasingly eclectic. “It sounds daft in hindsight, but I’d never properly been to a literary festival before I set up mine,” says Liz Vater, founder and director of Stoke Newington literary festival in north London. “I’ve been a ferocious reader all my life, but I felt excluded from the literary scene. Fifteen years ago, most festivals felt as though they were organised by formidable committees of people who were still very proud of having read English literature at Cambridge. I had a BSc in geography from Swansea, so felt like a fish out of water.”
It was only when Vater’s husband, the author Pete Brown, did his first festival event that a thought occurred to her: “Why on earth isn’t there a better version of this in Stoke Newington, which has a rich literary and radical history?” She paid for the first festival on her credit card, and her 27 acts included Tony Benn, Shappi Khorsandi, AC Grayling and Stewart Lee reading a ghost story in an old garment warehouse.
Today, the festival has an established partnership with the publisher Picador, but remains volunteer-run. “We have no large salary bills to foot, so it was an easier decision to eschew corporate sponsorship, which wouldn’t fit with our ethos anyway,” Vater says.
That ethos might be described as a desire to “shake things up a bit”. “Sometimes it feels as though literary festivals are talking to the same people over and over again: affluent, middle-class people who love ‘literature’ and feel very at home amongst people like themselves.”
Stoke Newington’s audience is younger, more diverse and with a more equal gender split than most other festivals, facts Vater attributes to its affordability – the average price of event tickets is about £7 – and to its programming. “This year we put a superb project by Speaking Volumes – about older women’s voices – front and centre at our main opening gala night,” she says. “Ten years ago we’d have played it safe and put a big headliner there, but our audience is happy to give new things a chance.”
Festivals can be mixed experiences for writers. Some way into her writing career, Melissa Harrison arrived at a well-known book festival. She had spoken at the event before, and was happy to return. This time, however, she learned the organisers had arranged for a local radio DJ to host some of the spoken-word events. Harrison’s work ranges from novels to children’s books, but she was at the festival to discuss her nature writing, and the radio DJ, seemingly confounded by the subject, sought to enliven proceedings.
“He came on stage, and he’d draped himself with garlands and plastic birds, and he draped me with garlands and plastic birds,” she says. “And he had prepared a birdsong identification quiz for me live on stage with no warning.” The songs he played did not belong to British birds, and Harrison floundered. “I came off stage feeling incredibly humiliated.”
The incident is one of many – good and bad – that Harrison can list from across more than a decade of promoting her work at book festivals. For every galvanising discussion or heartening encounter with a reader, there have been strange pairings with other authors, hosts who clearly have not read her work, a general lack of organisation or food, or a failure to pay.
“It could be a lovely experience that’s incredibly rewarding, and inspiring, and sends you away on top of the world. Or you could end up feeling incredibly small. A lot of the time I’m not really sure what I’m there for, or what people want from me.”
For Tomiwa Owolade, the experience is still quite new. He began promoting his first book, This Is Not America, in June 2023, and is still being booked for live events. “It feels never-ending,” he says. “It’s like the Taylor Swift Eras tour.” It has taken him from Cliveden, with its glamorous authors’ dinner and a night in a four-poster bed, to a recent trip to Berwick, for which he rose at 6am and returned home to London after midnight.
By and large he has found the experience “positive, flattering”, he says. “Some authors are more focused on the work and hate doing publicity. Some authors love the glamorous side, they derive great satisfaction from it. I love it. I love experiencing the very small sliver of recognition.”
For Harrison, live events can feel more exposing. “Most authors are introverts and don’t always enjoy being on stage and being public and having to be quite ‘on’ in that way,” she says.
She often finds herself wondering why people choose to attend. “There’s someone sitting on a stage having a conversation with someone else, and you’ve paid 10 quid or something. And often I don’t feel that much has been imparted worth the entrance fee.” Her response has been to “try to do a bit more” – memorising a section of the book to deliver without notes, for instance. “Because I think you should show the effort that you’ve made, and perhaps turn it into some kind of performance or event.”
Despite differing approaches, both authors have often found encountering their readership complicated. Both mention a certain aggression. “What I find interesting is the people who ask really hostile questions,” Owolade says. “I think: ‘Well, you’re the one who’s paid to be here.’” Harrison describes “a contingent of people who come because they want to be a writer and they want to know what the secret is”. Their tone can be “very slightly aggressive”, she says. “What they want is you to tell them what they will need to know – the thing that will unlock a different life for them. It’s as if there’s a secret and you’re holding on to it, you’re gatekeeping.”
Still, she sees something reassuring in the fact that people still choose to buy books at all. “I think people want to have contact with a culture that matters to them,” Harrison says. “It reassures you that it’s still there and it’s still real. These are real people, and you can take away a real book with their name in it. And perhaps in a world where everything is becoming quite virtual and untrustworthy and AI-driven, there’s something in that actual physical contact.”
For many, the space created by the Baillie Gifford exit has seemed daunting; Hay’s chief executive, Julie Finch, spoke of the “possible decimation of the festival” after losing half a million pounds, and the hunt for deep-yet-ethical pockets continues. For others, the sponsorship vacancy has offered an opportunity. This month, it was announced that the Fane Group would be the new sponsors of Henley literary festival. Since launching in 2017, Fane has come to dominate the world of spoken-word event production. The company operates internationally and online, and has programmed tours and standalone events for authors such as Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Day and Miriam Margolyes.
“We appreciate where we stand within the wider ecosystem of the bookselling community,” the company’s founder, Alex Fane, says via email. “When I read about all the Baille Gifford developments, I sensed an opportunity to strengthen our support through a festival partnership.” He is adamant that the nature of Henley will not change. “Nor will its programming.”
The rise of the glamorous new spoken-word scene – of the kind exemplified by Fane’s productions – should not be regarded as a threat to the longstanding book festival tradition. “I’m a big believer that there is space for every type of event and that healthy competition increases the opportunities for all,” he says. “Of course there is some overlap, but in general we must all be behind increasing the reach of the literary world.”
Elsewhere, the moment has prompted many organisers to contemplate the role of individual festivals, and how they cater to their specific communities. In Durham, the director of the city’s book festival, Rebecca Wilkie, cites this year’s celebration of Pat Barker as an example of the kind of event that is possible with a festival’s marriage of geography and passion.
“In the queue afterwards there were lots of people of all ages coming up to her saying: ‘Until I read you, I didn’t know you could be a writer if you came from Teesside,’” she says. Other events included a discussion of regional devolution, and creative writing workshops. “It felt like a brilliant north-east celebration.”
In Ilkley, Erica Morris and her team have been focusing on “hyperlocal” community projects as part of the festival’s Word Up North programme, but also on rethinking how festivals can play a role in broader conversations – including the issues raised by the Baillie Gifford controversy. “I think people feel more empowered to speak up for the issues they care about,” Morris says. “And I think literary festivals are places that should be part of that discussion.
“Some people see us as gatekeepers, that we are more powerful and richer than we are, or that we are purveyors of culture,” she says. “We’re not. We can provide platforms for discussion and debate and different points of view, and try and be better ourselves. We can be part of the change.”