How Petworth’s little sister became an equal partner: Petworth Festival Literary Week

For years, the literary week has been seen as little sister to the July arts festival in the town, but as artistic director Stewart Collins says, those days have changed. Running from Thursday, October 27-Sunday, November 6, the Petworth Festival Literary Week welcomes Michael Parkinson, Kate Mosse and Ben Macintyre as part of its most ambitious programme yet.

“It was very hard initially to get the programme together for this year,” Stewart says. “I think there was a lot of Covid catch-up and a lot of people being very cagey and then it all suddenly started falling into place. Usually I make the approaches in February and March and usually by April I have a good idea of the programme but this year it was very much mid-June before I reached that point. Luckily I held my nerve. But what is brilliant about booking a literary festival is that there are so many options with so many big publishing houses and lots of big books coming out. You just have to wait for the ones that you really want to have. But I do think that this year we have taken a slightly different approach to it. I think we've usually tended to see the literary festival as the little sister to the main festival in the summer but we've had a couple of new board members that have come in with a fresh perspective and have said really this is as big and as important a festival as the main festival in terms of the number of people and events and so on. They felt that we should stand up and shout more about it which of course we've always done but this year, as I say, it is slightly different. Usually we thought of the literary festival as the little sister but now it's very much the twin sister or the twin brother, an equal sibling.

“There are as many events but they are more concentrated than they are during the festival. In the festival in the summer we would have maybe two, at most three a day, but with the literary week we're having three or four or five a day. So it is much more concentrated but it is still more than 40 events and in that sense it is the equal so I do think it is actually quite helpful that we have changed our perceptions this year. It is certainly bigger this year. We started off all those years back when it was the Petworth Literary Weekend and then we realised after about three or four years that we were already extending it to five days so we changed it to the Petworth Literary Week and now we're stretching to about ten days so I don't know what we might end up calling it! But what is really good is that we now have a really good relationship with the publishing industry. People do recognise that we are putting on very serious events. And this year we have been more deliberate about getting the wide range that we have got. As a reflection of what we do in the summer really. We try to cater very broadly to appeal to as many different people as we can rather than just niche classical or whatever and that is the same now with the literary festival. This year we've extended to include so many different things.” How things move on from here obviously depends on the audiences: “Suddenly pre-pandemic the audiences for the literary week we're going up ten to 15 per cent. We need to see how that goes but if the growth curve continues there's no reason at all why we shouldn't continue to expand.” For line-up see, p58.