SPECIAL GUEST NORTHERN HIGHLIGHT - Durham Book Festival

 SPECIAL GUEST NORTHERN HIGHLIGHT

Rebecca Wilkie, Durham Book Festival

Durham Book Festival has been running for 31 years and is one of the country's oldest literature festivals. How has it grown and changed during that time?

New Writing North have been producing DBF on behalf of Durham County Council since 2011 and in that time we’ve grown the audience hugely. I’m proud that over the last ten years we have developed two community reading
programmes: the Big and Little Read, which see the whole of County Durham sharing the same great books. 

This year’s Big Read is Lemn Sissay’s memoir My Name is Why - 3000 copies will be distributed across the county via the library service, prison library service and Durham University. Our 2021 Little Read is Look Up! by Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola - 2000 copies will be going to every primary school and nursery setting in Durham, and we’ve developed a suite of online resources linked to the book, for teachers and families to use. We’ve also filmed a draw-along session with Dapo Adeola, which I hope children in Durham and beyond will love.

Look Up! written by Nathan Bryon and illustrated by Dapo Adeola. Published by Puffin. 

How have you adapted due to the pandemic? Have book festivals been changed for ever?

We presented the entire festival digitally last year, in response to the pandemic, which was a very steep learning curve! Despite the stresses of having to learn how to film, edit and caption events practically overnight, it was lovely to increase the number of international authors we worked with, as well as reaching more international audiences. We also had great feedback from the disabled community and people who wouldn’t ordinarily be able to travel to Durham for live events. 

I think elements of digital programming will stay with most festivals for ever, as well as live-streaming. It would feel very wrong to have created these new access opportunities only to take them away again. In 2020, we - along with many other festivals - offered all our content free-of-charge. Unfortunately this is not a sustainable model for most book festivals in the long-term, so this year we’ll be charging for some of our digital content. A big challenge for festivals going forward will be how to balance our limited budgets and how to encourage audiences (who are able to) to pay for digital content.

 

What should people expect from the festival this year, and how can they access the events?

This year’s Durham Book Festival will be a hybrid – we’ll be opening with a digital weekend between 9-10 October and closing with a long weekend of live events at the Gala Theatre, Durham, between 14-17 October. We’ll be live-streaming some of our events from the Gala Theatre, so hopefully we’re presenting a number of ways for people to engage with the festival, depending on their confidence levels. 

We’ve got some great speakers in the programme this year, from Lemn Sissay being interviewed by Kit de Waal, and Anita Rani introducing her memoir The Right Sort of Girl, to brilliant North East writers such as David Almond talking about his new children’s book Bone Music, and Pat Barker introducing The Women of Troy. We’re trialling a small programme of school events via Zoom this year and have invited Elle McNicoll, Richard O’Neill and Amika George to talk about their books. The events can be watched live or afterwards, which we hope offers teachers a bit more flexibility than usual.

 

Which are your favourite children's books set in the North, and who are your favourite local writers and illustrators?

 When I was growing up in Liverpool, I don’t recall reading a single children’s book that was set there - although the city was well-represented on TV and stage. Shirley Hughes, who originally comes from the Wirral, was my favourite picture book author as a child and remains so now, although most of her illustrations are inspired by Notting Hill, where she made her home as an adult, and I now think Liverpool’s Frank Cottrell Boyce is wonderful. 

When I was a teenager, reading Willy Russell’s Educating Rita in school felt very significant – Rita sounded like someone we knew and we felt so proud that this play, that teenagers all over the country were studying, came from our city! I think David Almond’s books must evoke the same pride and sense of possibility for children reading them here in the North East - he captures the spirit and cadences of this region so beautifully. Another representation of the North East I love is in the Berwick-based picture-book maker Helen Stephens’s gorgeous book How to Hide A Lion, which has illustrations inspired by County Durham’s Bowes Museum. 

Art from How to Hide a Lion by Helen Stephens (also pictured), published by Alison Green Books - combined image taken from Bowes Museum website

I wish there were more children’s books set in the North, I think it is so powerful for young readers (and adults too!), to recognize the settings of the books they read and feel that their voices and experiences matter.

Rebecca Wilkie is Senior Programme Manager (Festivals and Events) for New Writing North. 

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