Our 2026 four-day celebration of books, ideas and storytelling for all ages with over 45 events came to a close yesterday in Marlborough.
Mary-Vere Parr, Marlborough LitFest Chair, 28 September, 2026:
From the moment the farmers started filing into the Town Hall on Thursday night to hear Helen Browning and Minette Batters talk about their respective autobiographies, we knew that LitFest 2026, our 17th festival, was going to be A Thing.
A festival of ideas, insights and inspiration for sure, but also of numbers: the 1,800 local children from 35 schools we reached the week before the festival; the 95 Marlborough St Mary’s pupils who sang on the Town Hall steps on Thursday morning; the 105 volunteers who made the 46 events over a packed four-day weekend happen; the record number of books and the nearly 4,000 tickets sold; and the record number of people (five) we squeezed onto the Town Hall stage for the celebration of a decade of Penned Up, HMP Erlestoke’s literary festival.
When Anthony Seldon rolled up his sleeves on Saturday morning to say Britian needs women and men of integrity and intellectual prowess committed to public service, he really needed to look no further than Minette and Helen, or perhaps former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who spoke on Friday afternoon, and certainly his interviewer Rebecca Jones.
We were not short of intellectual prowess: Professor Tim Kindall discussing the letters between William Golding and his Faber editor Charles Montieth with Golding’s daughter Judy Carver; novelist Sebastian Faulks, this year’s Golding Speaker; Anthony Seldon himself; Nick Fogg, Shakespeare scholar, polymath and thrice Mayor of Marlborough; and author, translator and editor Daniel Hahn, who aside from being “the nicest man in publishing” is also one of the best and most versatile interviewers on the planet; not to mention the ecclesiastical clout of the Dean of Westminster and the Bishop of St Albans discussing architectural historian Jon Cannon’s legacy.
On Sunday we had a bevy of PhD-holding novelists in St Peter’s. Both debut authors, Helen Bain and Sara Bayat, and their interviewer, Nicola Presley, hold doctorates. In conversation with local author Jon Stock under St Peter’s beautiful arch which speaks so eloquently of a humble spirit, Benjamin Wood entranced his audience with tales of how he wrote his novel Seascraper longhand sitting in the rain on a bench in the graveyard of his village church.
Sitting at the back of St Peter’s was Simon Martin, director of the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, who nearly read English at Oxford but chose instead to study art history. Thank heavens he did as, back in the Town Hall, Simon led us through his current exhibition “British Landscapes: A Sense of Place” with erudition and a gift for the perfectly-turned phrase and the telling personal anecdote.
As in life, variety is the spice of a festival. Historian Guy Walters flew in on the back of Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, Chloe Dalton held adults and children spellbound with her new illustrated children’s edition of Raising Hare, Michael Pugh spoke of riding from Moscow to Romania on horseback, Paul de Zulueta of his grandmother Daphne du Maurier and there were sessions on poetry, punctuation and performance psychology, all caught by our roving team of student reporters.
But throughout the weekend, themes emerged: of writers who are also singer-songwriters (historian Amy Jeffs and novelist Benjamin Woods to name but two); Sathnam Sanghera talked about pop icon George Michael, and the singing Bishop of St Albans, the Right Reverend Dr Andrew Rumsey, entertained us on Saturday night with his folk songs.
We celebrated the beauty of the book as a made thing, whether it be sketchbooking with artist and illustrator Emma Leyfield, Amy Jeffs’ woodcut illustrations for Arthur: A New Life or Sherin Aminossehe’s architectural drawings of railway stations.
For children, Supertato superstar Sue Hendra and comic artist Kev F Sutherland lead gloriously hands-on making and drawing sessions in the White Horse Bookshop and there was crafting and storytelling galore at the Parade Cinema too.
The festival has never looked so good. The sun shone in Marlborough High Street, and for our walk in Wootton Rivers; our main Town Hall stage was dressed by interior designer Susie Watson; everywhere there were local, seasonal flower arrangements by Tor Frost; and authors sat against the backdrop of graphic designer and artist Aly Storey’s beautiful LitFest brochure front cover – diaphanous flying books a perfect image for the festival energy that helps words and ideas fly off the page and linger in the mind long after the weekend.
Keep up with all the LitFest news at marlboroughlitfest.org and please put next year’s festival dates 23-26 September 2027 in your diary!