A sneak preview of the Petworth Festival Literary Week

21st October 2018

The Petworth Festival Literary Week 2018: Saturday 27th October – Sunday 4th November 

The Petworth Festival’s 40th anniversary year continues with this year’s literary festival programme. With events covering sport, the arts, writing, current affairs, history, poetry and food, not to mention top-line fiction, West Sussex is looking forward to a fascinating and stimulating week. Popular demand has forced organisers to extend the traditional Festival Literary Weekend to a full week!

The likes of Max Hastings, Michael Morpurgo, Fay Weldon, Sebastian Faulks, Kate Williams, Paddy Ashdown, Alan Titchmarsh and Julian Fellowes are some of the headline names, but check out all 27 events as they all promise golden nuggets of interest and stimulation for the curious reader.

TripFiction members – fans of writing with a strong sense of place – might be particularly interested in the following Festival events….although some might seem more TripFact than TripFiction:

Sebastian Faulks in conversation with Hephzibah Anderson

Acclaimed novelist Sebastian Faulks talks about his most recent novel, Paris Echo. Here is Paris as you have never seen it before – a city in which every building seems to hold the echo of an unacknowledged past, the shadows of Vichy and Algeria. American postdoctoral researcher Hannah and runaway Moroccan teenager Tariq have little in common, yet both are susceptible to the daylight ghosts of Paris. Hannah listens to the extraordinary witness of women who were present under the German Occupation; in her desire to understand their lives, and through them her own, she finds a city bursting with clues and connections. Out in the migrant suburbs, Tariq is searching for a mother he barely knew. For him in his innocence, each boulevard, Métro station and street corner is a source of surprise.

In his urgent and deeply moving new novel, Faulks deals with questions of empire, grievance and identity. With great originality and a dark humour, Paris Echo asks how much we really need to know if we are to live a valuable life.

Robin Knox-Johnston in conversation with Stewart Collins

Following the memorable encounter with Sir Chris Bonington in 2017, we meet another of Britain’s great adventurers. Sir Robin Knox-Johnston burst to fame when he became the first man ever to complete a single-handed, non-stop circumnavigation of the world. Now, 50 years on from that famous voyage, he joins us in Petworth to talk about his extraordinary life story.

Following time with the Royal Naval Reserve and in the merchant navy, Knox-Johnston spied for the British government in the Gulf, worked in the South African dockyards, and built his famous boat Suhaili in Bombay. In June 1968, he set sail in Suhaili in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, and his new autobiography Running Free vividly brings to life that remarkable voyage, where he was the only person to finish the race, completing his journey on 22 April 1969. He completed a second solo circumnavigation of the globe in 2007 aged 68, thus becoming the oldest to complete this feat.

Henry Blofeld in conversation with Stewart Collins

Henry Blofeld is a broadcasting legend. In fact more than that – a national treasure, whose voice has been the sound of summer to thousands of cricket lovers all over the world. The voice of BBC’s Test Match Special for over forty years, Blowers talks with Stewart Collins about his recent autobiography: a celebration of his career commentating on the sport he loves and packed with entertaining stories reliving his favourite moments in the sport and sharing behind the scenes anecdotes in his inimitable style.

Jana Bakunina & Angus Roxburgh – Bird’s Milk & Moscow Calling

Modern day Russia is as much an enigma as the vast sprawling nation has ever been. To offer contrasting – but complementary – perspectives on the Russia that has evolved out of the communist era, Petworth welcomes two writers with first hand experiences of a remarkable period of history. The ‘Russian Londoner’ Jana Bakunina tells the story of her childhood in the Soviet Union from the early days of perestroika to the collapse of the USSR, whilst former BBC Moscow Correspondent Angus Roxburgh offers his own perspective on a world that changed around him and which saw him meeting with some of the key players in Russian government, not to mention encounters and spoiling tactics of the KGB.

Jana Bakunina was born in Ekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city, situated nearly 2,000km east of Moscow. At 16, she won a scholarship to a boarding school in Germany and from there secured a place to study Economics & Management at Oxford. She moved to London and built a career in corporate finance. Most recently, she has teamed up with Lord Waheed Alli to invest in start-ups run by female and/or ethnic minority founders.

A graduate in Russian, Angus Roxburgh worked as a translator in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s before becoming a journalist and, eventually, BBC’s Moscow Correspondent in September 1991. During these ‘Yeltsin years’ he covered the war in Chechnya and the chaotic introduction of capitalism to Russia following the collapse of communism and the rise of Vladimir Putin.

TripFiction’s Andrew is going to hear the revered author Sebastian Faulks talk about Paris Echo, and also to hear Fay Weldon talk about a couple of her own recently published books. Watch out for his review of these events and get in touch if you happen to be in beautiful Petworth between 27th October & 4th November!

Andrew for the TripFiction team

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