THE 2015 ESSEX BOOK FESTIVAL IS COMING!

Hot off the press.  The Essex Book Festival for 2015 is going to be bigger and better than ever before.  Wait till you see the line-up.  Absolutely fabulous, can't wait to receive my programme. 

The whole event kicks off on March 1st and we have the chance of welcoming more than 100 writers, dramatists, filmmakers, poets, artists and creative folk to our county, who  will be entertaining our audiences for the whole month of March. 

As Ros Green, our Festival Director says:

The programme includes everyone from the ever popular crime writer/poet Sophie Hannah and the iconic comic poet Pam Ayres, through to ex-Home Secretary Labour MP Alan Johnson, Winner of The Orwell Prize 2014 for his memoir 'This Boy', and debut author Jessie Burton, Winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year 2014 for her best-selling novel 'The Miniaturist'.

Our festival theme for 2015 is METAMORPHOSIS. This  marks two new festival strands: a Human Rights strand, which will be launched by Shami Chakrabarti, Director of 'Liberty', and an Art strand, which will be launched by Maggi Hambling, one of the UK's most distinguished contemporary artists. 

It also recognises our exciting new partnership with Southend Libraries. Together, that is, with our inaugural international literary twinning with Poland,  which fittingly will culminate in a Polish/UK writer's event 'Literary Piers' in The Cultural Centre at the end of the world's longest pleasure pier in Southend-on-Sea.

Lots of fun and exciting literary events planned which will most certainly brighten up thoughts of spring ahead of us. Watch this space for photographs and news.  Tickets on sale from 7 January.   Programmes can be obtained from local libraries.