First-ever Fishbourne Literary Festival quiz night coming up

Author David Bathurst will talk about writing and his books. He has walked all the complete National Trails of Great Britain and written more than 30 books. David will then set the quiz rolling with a few questions. The evening will also include a plougman’s meal. The event is for teams of four to six people. Tickets £15 through the Festival of Chichester.

Chairman Simon Cox said: “The idea is to carry on the interest in the literary festival a little bit and just to have a fun evening. It's the first time we have done it. We have done church quizzes before but not a literary quiz as such. Part of it is to keep the interest going in literature and in books in the community but it's also about continuing the profile of the literary festival and there is a little bit of fund-raising for the church included.

“Lots of people enjoy quizzes. We just thought it would be a nice idea to bring together the brainiacs and literature lovers and book groups just to have a fun evening together but with the added attraction of David speaking. He's going to kick off the event and once he has talked about his writing he is going to create a few questions for us to get the quiz rolling. He's going ask five questions which will be Sussex based and loosely literary and then we will have a number of rounds and then a simple ploughman’s dinner which is all part the event. We're trying to get teams of six but if someone wants to come along on their own then they are very welcome and we will just mix and match and include them in a team. The teams will be between four and six people.”

It is all about building on the success of this March’s literary festival: “It went very well and we had lots of very good feedback. We did some feedback forms and the cake was highly rated! People loved the speakers and people loved the book sale and they also loved the book shop that we set up where you could buy books signed by our authors. Lots of people are saying that they would come again and we've already got our dates for next year. There were a couple of things that people asked us to do slightly differently for next year, issues that were known and some of the funding from this year will be used to replace the marquee that we had that got destroyed the night before the festival. And some of the funds will also go towards replacing our sound system.”

The date for next year’s literary festival is Saturday, April 13.

In the meantime, just to get you thinking along the right lines for the literary quiz, Simon offers a few questions to which your appetite: Which author created the aggressive, lethal plants called triffids? Who wrote On Beauty and White Teeth? Two novels by Alan Sillitoe were filmed in the 1960s. One was The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. What was the other?

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