Marlborough LitFest is delighted to announce that broadcaster and author John Suchet, horticulturalist Poppy Okotcha and acclaimed novelist Clare Chambers will join 2025 Golding Speaker Alan Hollinghurst at this year’s festival from 25 – 28 September.
LitFest is inviting people to sign up to Friends of LitFest for 2025 to take advantage of priority booking for this year’s festival. For £30, Friends of LitFest also receive a festival brochure in the post and are invited to LitFest celebrations and events throughout the year.
This year, LitFest is encouraging supporters to step up a level to become a Gold, Silver or Bronze Friend attracting further benefits including free tickets. New for 2025, in response to some generous individual donations, the Authors’ Circle offers the option to support an author event, meet the author and receive a signed copy of their book. Please see the Friends of LitFest page on our website here for more information and details on how to sign up.
As a charitable arts organisation run by volunteers, LitFest relies on financial support from Friends as well as sponsors, ensuring the festival can deliver a varied programme and community outreach for schools and families. Last year we reached more than 1,200 children and young people through our free author events for schools, as well as offering free storytelling and craft activities around the town and the Once Upon a Trail along Marlborough High Street.
Veteran news journalist and broadcaster John Suchet is well known for his regular Classic FM presenting and classical music knowledge. The author of several bestselling composer biographies, he will be appearing at LitFest 2025 to talk about his latest book on Beethoven, In Search of Beethoven: A Personal Journey. Part biography, part memoir, part travelogue, Suchet draws on his own life and career as a foreign correspondent and broadcaster to illustrate how Beethoven’s music has accompanied him through the best and the worst of times.
In A Wilder Way trained horticulturalist, regenerative grower and former St John’s Marlborough student Poppy Okotcha reflects on her ever-changing Devon garden. Her memoir cum practical guidebook weaves personal stories and folktales from Okotcha’s English and Nigerian heritage into a month-by-month exploration of the joys and challenges of the gardening year.
Acclaimed novelist Clare Chambers will talk about her latest novel Shy Creatures at this year’s LitFest. Following Small Pleasures, her 2020 word-of-mouth hit longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Shy Creatures confirms Chambers as one of our most talented writers. Returning to the mid-20th century, profoundly English world of Small Pleasures, she relates a story based on a true event with the same acute observation and exquisite prose.
Mary-Vere Parr, Festival Chair, said: “We are so excited to be announcing these authors and can’t wait to welcome them to Marlborough in September. They represent the quality and variety of the festival line-up which makes Marlborough LitFest so special.”
Marlborough LitFest 2025 will provide an exciting mix of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s authors and free family activities over the festival weekend. Already announced for this year’s line-up is award-winning novelist, Alan Hollinghurst, as LitFest’s 2025 Golding Speaker. The festival aims to champion new, upcoming writers as well as established names and also to encourage a love of reading in children and young people with author talks, competitions and our ongoing community outreach programme.
The full programme will be announced in late June with priority booking for Friends of LitFest from 30 June and general ticket sales from 11 July. For more information and regular 2025 festival programme updates click here
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