2024 Festival Review

Jeanette Winterson held the audience spellbound – or more potently ghostbound – with complex connections between beliefs, AI, hauntings and storytelling from her short story collection Night Side of the River.

This year’s debut highlights were Joelle Taylor’s The Night Alphabet, a powerful story of alternative histories told through the interconnective weavings of body art, and Noel O’Regan’s Though the Bodies Fall, centred around a suicide blackspot at the headland of Kerry – both superb and highly recommended. A first weekend highlight was Jacqueline Crooks and debut author Fiona Williams discussing the Caribbean influences at work in Fire Rush and The House of Broken Bricks.

On Saturday 24 Feb, Shepherd Neame Old Brewery Store was packed to the rafters for more than a touch of romance, humour and escapism with Scotland's most charming Alexander McCall Smith, much-loved author of the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which has sold over 25 million copies.

Last but certainly not least the closing event to the festival, with the amazing literary powerhouse Kate Mosse, founder of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, in conversation with journalist and author Alex Preston.

The wonderful efforts of all the festival volunteers, tech crew, caterers and venue staff.

We were thrilled to include on the programme astronaut and bestselling author Tim Peake in conversation with Julia Wheeler about his new book Space: The Human Story.

Sarah Marsh and Lesley McDowell talking historical fiction on the opening Saturday of the festival, a very special event made accessible for the deaf, deafened and hard of hearing with live captions and BSL interpreters.

Local writer Andy Capon who brought laughter and tears to a packed audience at the Assembly Rooms with candid retellings of his experiences of mental health problems, and how humour helped him turn his life around.

Steven Moffat, writer of the Dr Who and Sherlock series, joining a panel event about the CERN Large Hadron Collider and how a group of authors worked alongside the physicists to learn about their work and transform their experiences into a collection of short stories, Collision.

The glorious light shining into the Guildhall as Geoff Nicholson and Sonia Overall discuss walking, psychogeography, and Geoff’s latest book Walking on Thin Air; followed by the Tainted Love evening in which 15 local authors were invited to perform their work on stage to an audience, some making their work public for the first time.

The festival would like to express thanks to Queen Elizabeth Grammar School for allowing us to use their high-tech modern theatre that has a fully accessible stage, allowing us to include on the programme journalist Peter Apps talking about the future of Nato and geopolitics with local author and China specialist Kerry Brown.

A huge thank you to all the authors, poets and hosts who took part, especially all those who managed to reach Faversham despite a landslip that caused the closure of train lines out of London on the busiest weekend of the festival. Last but certainly not least, everyone who came along to our events. We hope you enjoyed it!