Cambridge Literary Festival returns 23-27 April, with an extensive line-up for book lovers of all ages
This year’s Spring Literary Festival will bring a range of established and emerging novelists, poets, writers, broadcasters, environmentalists, politicians and campaigners to the city. Venues will include the Cambridge Union Debating Chamber (right), the Palmerston Room and the Old Divinity School at St John’s College. “Once again, we are thrilled at the positive response of writers to come to Cambridge to share their books and ideas with our enthusiastic attendees,” says festival director Cathy Moore. “We’re grateful for our constant, supportive and growing audiences, and we are particularly proud this year to be able to present an entirely free children’s festival.”
Children’s authors such as Cressida Cowell, Jacqueline Wilson and Christopher Lloyd will provide a weekend of interactive, fun events. A series of festival events also focuses on the extraordinary work and lives of women. On 27 April, Bloomsbury scholar and art historian Frances Spalding will deliver the third A Room of One’s Own lecture (see above), which interrogates how far women have come since Virginia Woolf wrote ‘lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind’.
BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Emma Barnett examines what happens to women’s lives when they become mothers in her new book Maternity Service, while Diane Abbott discusses her life as the first black woman elected to the House of Commons.
Lit fest highlights
- Samantha Harvey: 23 April, 6pm at University Arms Hotel
- George Monbiot: 24 April, 6pm at Cambridge Union
- Richard Ayoade: 24 April, 7.30pm at Cambridge Union
- Michael Heseltine: 25 April, 6.30pm at Cambridge Union
- Diane Abbott: 26 April, 12 noon at Cambridge Union
- Jacqueline Wilson: 26 April, 12 noon at Palmerston Room
- Emma Barnett: 26 April, 6pm at Cambridge Union
- Lindsey Hilsum: 27 April, 8pm at Cambridge Union
Cambridge Literary Festival runs 23-27 April. See cambridgeliteraryfestival.com
