Six of the Hexham Book Fest best
A personal choice from the programme
You can’t beat a book festival for the sheer range of topics covered in a short period - nor for the number of authors gathered in one place.
Sixty events over 10 days is the boast of the Hexham Book Festival team – headed by founding director Susie Troup and manager Gill Pugh - ahead of the 19th edition.
A festival that has grown in stature and popularity over the years has many friends and supporters, including the peerless David Almond who has called it “a leading creative force in the Northumbrian cultural landscape”.
Nobody could hope to get to everything – unless, perhaps, you’re book mad comedian Robin Ince, who kicks things off… but we’ll come to him shortly.
And it goes without saying that everyone will have their own list of the not-to-be-missed.
Big names for 2025 include (deep breath)… bibliophiles Ince and Lucy Mangan; classicist Mary Beard; politicians Baroness Warsi, Alan Johnson and Simon Hart; journalists Kate Summerscale and Michael Sheridan; novelists Jonathan Coe, Kevin Barry and A.L. Kennedy; historians Tim Bouverie, Lucy Noakes, Anthony Seldon and Terry Deary (the horrible bits); dance legend Wayne Sleep; poets Pam Ayres, Kate Fox and the Bloodaxe brace of Gillian Allnutt and Katrina Porteous (chaired by Neil Astley, founder of the famous, Hexham-based poetry publisher); and environmentalists Tony Juniper, Tom Heap, James Rebanks and Mike Berners-Lee.
Actually, such a list is hopeless… there is simply SO much. And every participant is a big name in someone’s reading world.
Leaving out those whose events are already sold out – including North East crime-writing phenomenon LJ Ross, celebrating the 10th anniversary of her debut, Holy Island – here’s a personal Six of the Best of the Best…
1) Robin Ince (you’ll have heard him with Prof Brian Cox presenting BBC Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage) is not so much a bibliophile as a bibliomaniac. He admits as much. I bought a copy of his lockdown book, Bibliomaniac, in a second hand bookshop (appropriately, as it happened) and was swept up in his madcap whistlestop tour of more than 100 independent bookshops, doing an event in each one. The scattergun intellect and tireless dedication keep the pages turning – but his jaw-dropping book-buying compulsion is the thing. The man simply can’t resist – and to call his tastes eclectic is to err on the side of understatement. His new book, it might not surprise you to learn, is called Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity. Ince, diagnosed with ADHD, will be chatting about it – a lot, probably - to Harry Pearson. Who could resist? (May 2, 7.30pm, Queen’s Hall Arts Centre).
2) Alan Johnson, the former Labour cabinet minister, writes beautifully and speaks eloquently. He has written a popular biography of Harold Wilson for a new Swift Press series on British prime ministers (we’ve had Churchill, now Wilson; and Thatcher and Attlee are on the way). It’s called Harold Wilson, for obvious reasons. When I was growing up there were two famous politicians: Wilson, who smoked a pipe, and Ted Heath, who skippered a yacht and played the piano (there were three if you included Mike Yarwood who impersonated both of them). Johnson on Wilson and in conversation with Chris Mullin, author, diarist and fellow former Labour minister, seems a package worth the ticket price. (May 3, 2.30pm, Queen’s Hall Arts Centre).
3) Lucy Mangan is a journalist and author who worked in a bookshop before doing either of those things for a living. I love her writing and her wit – she’s an excellent TV critic for The Guardian. But she loves books more than most people (except, perhaps, Robin Ince) and what could be better at a book festival than to hear someone talk about a book about books? Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives is her latest, a sequel to her 2018 Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading in which she explained how her “bookish” habit formed. In the new book she relates how books and reading have helped her through challenging circumstances, including the grief she felt after the death of her dad in 2023. The event will be chaired by Anna Disley of New Writing North. (May 4, 1.15pm, Queen’s Hall Arts Centre)
4) Jonathan Coe is a novelist whose latest new one is always eagerly seized upon. He’s a master of satire known for capturing the mood of the moment. In his award-winning 1994 novel, What a Carve Up! he critiqued the Thatcher government; in Middle England (2018) he captured the Brexit angst. The latest, The Proof of my Innocence, is set during Liz’s Truss’s time in 10 Downing Street (no, it’s not especially short). The author has said he wanted to attempt what Graham Greene used to call “an entertainment”, so the novel, which starts as ‘cosy crime’ before moving into ‘dark academia’, is “full of jokes – some of them corny, some (I hope) a bit more sophisticated – and narrative curve-balls. First and foremost, my intention was simply to give the reader a good time while journeying through it.” Jacqui Hodgson chairs (May 4, 6.30pm, Queen’s Hall Arts Centre)
5) Pam Ayres seems to have been around forever and thank goodness for that. She’s a shoo-in for National Treasure status and one of those people who makes me smile before she’s even opened her mouth. Doggedly Onward: A Life in Poems includes poems from the 1970s to the present and is billed by the festival folk as “a cavalcade of much-loved dogs, her lifelong fascination with wildlife, the travel, mistakes, regrets, the heartbreak of leaving the family home, and the sober business of ageing”. Bet even the last on that list will tickle you. It’s the way she tells it, on paper and in person. Time she was made a Dame for services to cheering up the nation, I say. (May 8, 2.30pm, Queen’s Hall, Hexham)
6) Andrew Ziminski is a stonemason with four decades of experience and he is coming to Hexham to talk about Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles. Clearly, this is not a title put out with a covetous eye on the bestseller lists, but my hunch is that here’s a guy who knows his stuff and can share his passion with an audience. Ziminski can see stories where the layman will see, well… a fancy (or not so fancy) bit of a building mostly taken for granted. He has worked on famous cathedrals and visited more than 5,000 of Britain’s medieval churches, many of them the receptacles of awe-inspiring art on the doorstep. He will be sharing some of the secrets they hold in what promises to be a fascinating talk. (May 11, 12.45pm, Queen’s Hall Arts Centre)
But there are many other potential lists of equal appeal. To find your own highlights go to the Hexham Book Festival website.