Petworth Literary Festival launches on back of doubled audiences
Note the name change. It’s a significant one. Last year it was the Petworth Literary Week. This year it’s the Petworth Literary Festival – a change which reflects continued expansion and success.
Running from October 23-November 3, it promises “a world class literary festival in the South Downs” with “enlightening conversations, wisdom, and wit”, with Dame Judi Dench, Robert Harris, David Baddiel, Kate Mosse, Pam Ayres and Clare Balding among the guests.
Petworth Festival artistic director Stewart Collins launched the event originally as an autumn spin-off to Petworth’s summer (mostly music) festival. He is thrilled at the way it has developed: “It was one of those things that shortly after I started the job in Petworth it just struck me that the place was absolutely ideal for a literary festival. I hadn't done one before but I just felt that there was a fantastic basis of support for the summer festival with great loyalty among the audiences. The marketing person in me thought ‘Well, we have certainly got people here that we can entertain.’ There are lots of people around Petworth who are professional people or retired professional people or people that have expressed an interest in culture and the arts through their support for the summer festival.
“The literary festival is something that has been blossoming over the last 15-20 years generally across the country and I think it has been blossoming partly because it's a place where you can have lengthy intelligent discussions rather than just sound bites and snapshots. The idea is that you're listening to a clever person for 45 minutes, the audience then has the chance to question them and then the audience gets the chance to meet them. It was hardly surprising that it was so popular and I suppose I just jumped on the bandwagon really! It began as the Petworth Literary Weekend back in 2014 or maybe before, and it was literally 12 events. We were not sure how it would go, whether there were too many events or too few but it worked and there was the thirst for it. And then after four years or so we realised that we couldn't really call it a literary weekend because it was starting on Tuesday! So we rebranded it a literary week and we have now rebranded it this year as the literary festival because it's nearly a couple of weeks long.
“And last year was extraordinary. I know how difficult it has been post-Covid, and the impact of that has been felt and is still being felt across certain art forms but we realised that we were back to our pre-Covid levels last year, particularly for the literary festival when the literary festival doubled its audiences between 2022 and 2023. It was last year that people who were coming jumped up in terms of prestige and recognisability. Suddenly we had something that was almost a different animal and someone said to me ‘My goodness, this festival has really come of age’ which was lovely to hear.
“This year we are maybe the same size or perhaps one or two events more. But we are wanting to be prudent. We are thinking that if we can do as well as we did last year, then that would be great. But if we can do even better, then fantastic.”