#BehindTheScenes … at the CHELTENHAM LITERATURE FESTIVAL

#BehindTheScenes … at the Cheltenham Literature Festival 8-17 October 2021

This October sees the launch of Cheltenham’s major 3 year Festival theme: #ReadTheWorld

Well, Festival week is upon us. The tents are getting their finishing touches, writers all over the country are gathering up their books and train tickets and an army of staff and volunteers are in place ready to welcome almost 1,000 speakers, and hundreds of thousands of Festival-goers over the 10 days that lie ahead. After a very strange 18 months in the event world, it is a real joy to be putting on a full-scale Festival (with key Covid-19 safety measures in place, of course) and create the bookish autumn wonderland that Cheltenham is known for. 

As organisers, this week always has a brilliant – if nervous – energy to it: getting ready to see a year of preparations that we’ve all worked so hard on come to life. This year there has also been a new, very international element that has given a different flavour to our preparations.

This October sees the launch of Cheltenham’s major 3 year Festival theme: ‘Read the World’ and in amongst the immense amount of usual planning, we’ve also covered a good stretch of the globe in our preparations this year.

To give you an insight into what we’ve been up to:

We’ve filmed at home with 5 major world writers: Nigeria’s Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, the American double Pulitzer Prizewinner Colson Whitehead, Australian Lifetime Achievement in Literature Award winner Helen Garner, doyenne of Latin American literature Isabel Allende and Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk.

This year’s prestigious The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence (previously awarded to the likes of Ann Tyler, Seamus Heaney and Harold Pinter) will go to Elena Ferrante, and we’ve had a rare piece written by Ferrante reflecting on her life in writing that will be delivered by the actress Helen Atkinson Wood followed by a conversation with Ferrante’s long-term friend and publisher Eva Ferri and her translator Ann Goldstein dialling in live from New York.

Elsewhere one of our brilliant interviewers Georgina Godwin has been in Paris meeting Sylvia Whitman of Paris’ legendary Shakespeare and Co. bookshop ahead of their event together at the Festival. We will be celebrating a major world book shop for each year of the Read the World theme, and are delighted that Shakespeare and Co. will be the first to be featured. On the same day, a panel of Sebastian Faulks, Lauren Elkin and Alex Christof (a former ‘Tumbleweed’ at Sh & Co) will discuss how Paris has shaped their writing lives.

Excitingly, we’ve also recruited a dedicated ‘Literary Explorer in Residence’ Ann Morgan who will be helping audiences to discover amazing writing from around the world and we have rebranded our free Huddle stage to showcase a whole host of publishers, translators and writers who are crucial to helping words and ideas travel. Audiences will also see some international spins on some Festival favourites: this year’s Meet the Literary Editors event will get a companion edition in which we will hear from head Books writers from major publications such as The New York Times, Germany’s Die Zeit and The Irish Times.

Our younger literary explorers can journey around the Festival site on an Atlas of Adventures trail on site, they can enjoy stories from around the world in Story Shack and join our Family Guest Curators The Week Junior for an event on how to change your world.

Long-haul international travel is still tricky so we have arranged for some of the world’s greatest thinkers and writers to appear digitally in front of live Cheltenham audiences. I’m hugely excited for Rebecca Solnit and Deborah Levy’s unique trans-Atlantic conversation, to hear Jonathan Franzen and Amor Towles speak from the US about their major new novels and for our new series Conversations Without Borders which will explore issues including feminism and LGBTQi+ rights with a host of global speakers.

And it’s not just the big names: we’ve also worked with a range of brilliant international festival partners and funders to ensure we can platform the next generation of writing talent from across the globe. Watch out for showcases of writers from New Zealand, Japan, Australia, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Iceland and The Netherlands, either digitally or in person across the 10 days.

Our reputation for world-class Current Affairs debates continues, with leading experts and commentators from The Times, The Sunday Times and Chatham House joining for panels on topics diverse as US politics, the Climate Crisis, Global Britain post-Brexit, Africa’s next decade and more.

Elsewhere, we have incredible events on world art in the Art and Design strand, events on Russian Literature, James Baldwin and Latin American Magic Realism in Classic Literature and legendary Travel writer Colin Thubron joining the Travel and Adventure strand. And it doesn’t end on the Festival site: The Daffodil will host a range of international cuisine events and The Strand will showcase some gems of world cinema.

…nor does it all end on October 17th or is it limited to those who can be with us in Cheltenham. We are passionate about creating a world in which everyone can explore culture and thanks to our free daily YouTube highlights and our digital player: https://literature.cheltenhamfestivals.online, people can catch up on events until Dec 31st, wherever they are in the world.

We can’t wait to have you be part of it.

Lyndsey Fineran, programmes and commission manager for the Festival

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