Durham Book Festival
Join us at Durham Book Festival 2024
For one long buzzing autumn weekend, Durham invites you to celebrate the transformative power of words.
Get ready to be challenged, inspired, entertained, and swept away as some of the hottest names in fiction descend on the city, including Helen Fielding, Rebecca F. Kuang, Jodi Picoult, Alan Hollinghurst, Tracy Chevalier, and David Peace.
With over 35 events across three days, delve into history, humour, poetry, and philosophy.
Highlights include an exclusive dramatic reading from the latest novel of the acclaimed Durham author, Pat Barker CBE, and the Sunderland-born author Terry Deary – of Horrible Histories fame – discusses his first history book for adults.
Take part in creative writing workshops, join a children’s story time, explore the mysteries of the cosmos, uncover history’s hidden women, or hear about the challenges of writing in conflict zones.
What’s more, you can experience the most celebrated poets of 2024, as, for the first time, Durham plays host to the renowned Forward Prizes for Poetry. There’s also a chance to catch the former National Poet for Scotland, Jackie Kay.
Durham Book Festival takes place 10–13 October at Gala Durham, Clayport Library and Collected Books. Audiences can also join in online. Click on the links below to book, and find out more.
Rebecca F. Kuang: Yellowface
Rebecca F. Kuang, is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Yellowface, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick that was Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.
Yellowface explores issues around cancel culture and cultural appropriation in a page-turning thriller and has a legion of famous literary fans, including Stephen King who said it was: ‘Hard to put down. Harder to forget.’
Alan Hollinghurst: Our Evenings
Join award-winning author Alan Hollinghurst, in conversation with Tom Crewe (The New Life), to celebrate his first novel in over a decade.
Our Evenings follows schoolboy Dave Win as he navigates theatre, class and sexuality, and offers a portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience.
An Evening with Jackie Kay
The former Makar of Scotland, Jackie Kay, brings her long-awaited new poetry collection, May Day, to the festival. The collection covers several decades of political activism up to the present day when a global pandemic intersects with the urgency of Black Lives Matter.
Jodi Picoult: By Any Other Name
What if the greatest writer of all time isn’t who we think he is? What if he isn’t even a he?
By Any Other Name explores the theme of identity and the ways in which two female playwrights – one of whom might just be the real author of Shakespeare’s plays – must confront the sexism of a theatre world that diminishes the work of women, despite the centuries between them, as both are forced to hide behind another name to make their voices heard.
Terry Deary: A History of Britain in Ten Enemies
Horrible Histories author Terry Deary argues that nations and their leaders are defined by the enemies they make in his first book for adults. Boudica would be forgotten if it weren’t for the Romans, Elizabeth I, a minor royal without the Spanish Armada, Churchill an opposition windbag without Germany, and Thatcher remembered as a mean ‘milk-snatcher’ if it weren’t for the Argentines!
The Little Read
This year’s Little Read is I Am Brave, written by Caryl Hart and illustrated by Zoe Waring.
I Am Brave is the perfect picture book to highlight and celebrate the different ways that children tackle the difficult things in life … whether it’s speaking up in class, or choosing to do something different to their friends, or struggling to make friends in the first place!
Curated in partnership with Children’s Books North.
Workshops from Arvon and Children’s Books North
Arvon has been the UK’s home of creative writing for over 50 years, hosting courses and retreats led by acclaimed writers. Each year, over 40 of their courses are with vulnerable groups and schools, from young people who have experienced bullying to adults recovering from an addiction.
Children’s Books North connect and support published children’s writers, illustrators and publishing professionals living in the North West, North East, Yorkshire and Scotland, and focus on the importance of regional diversity in children’s books and the wider industry.
What's on
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Laura Fish: Lying Perfectly Still
10 October 2024
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The Forward Prizes for Poetry Ceremony
10 October 2024
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Workshop: Writing Life and Landscape with Kathryn Tann
11 October 2024
