This autumn’s 13th edition of the Petworth Festival Literary Week comes promised as the most varied and exciting to date (October 25 to November 5, www.petworthfestival.org.uk).
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00:00 Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor for Sussex Newspapers. Always
00:05 fabulous to be speaking to Stuart Collins, Artistic Director of Petworth Festival. Now,
00:09 we had the festival in the summer, it went brilliantly, and you're just embarking on
00:13 probably almost an ambitious Petworth Literary Week so far, which runs from October 25th
00:19 to November 5th. You've got some great names for the literary week, haven't you?
00:24 It's true. It's one of those things every year that as you start on the process, you
00:30 never quite know how you're going to end up. You know where you're aiming, you know you're
00:33 aiming high. You don't always hit. Fortunately, this year, it's really come together brilliantly.
00:39 I'm going to have to just refer to my brochure just to make sure I get some of these names
00:44 right. But I mean, in no particular, this is actually an alphabetical order, just looking
00:49 at the top names. But Michael Ball has got a new memoir out just for Christmas, and obviously
00:55 that's going to be getting a lot of people excited. But Julian Barnes is not someone
01:02 who appears very regularly in public, but as one of our foremost novelists, he's out
01:07 there. And I won't go through all the names, of course, because that could be extremely
01:10 boring. But we know that Jeremy Bowen, for example, great journalist, great historian,
01:18 Peter Frankopan, Philippa Gregory. There's some very, very good high profile names.
01:23 Yes, and it's the range as well, isn't it? You have the politics, you have the environment,
01:27 you have the arts, etc. It's all there, isn't it?
01:30 Yeah, I think that's very much what we see our role as doing. We try to cover pretty
01:35 much as many interest areas as we can, because obviously there are books about every interest
01:41 area. So yes, you're right, the environment is very well covered. I mean, Isabella Tree
01:46 is coming to talk about Rewilding and Knapp, of course, something very familiar to all
01:51 of us in Sussex. But yes, we've got talks about food, we've got obviously fiction, we've
01:59 got history, current affairs, memoirs. Yeah, it's very wide.
02:02 And really interestingly, you're trying to bridge what happened between the Summer Performance
02:07 Festival and the Autumn Literary Festival with a concert. Now, why are you trying to
02:12 close the two?
02:13 Yeah, thanks for asking that. I mean, the interesting thing is that we have the two
02:20 festivals and there is a strange degree of overlap between the audiences. You would have
02:29 thought that if you come to the Summer Festival, you'll come to the Literary Festival, because
02:32 it's the Pepworth Festival, it's your festival. But we've discovered that there's quite a
02:37 high percentage, not high percentage, but a significant minority of people who come
02:42 to the Summer who don't come to the Literary Festival. And we don't quite understand why.
02:46 So we're trying to bridge that gap by doing this Words and Music event. We've got the
02:50 fantastic Canadian classical pianist, Angela Hewitt, coming and she has put together an
02:58 evening with Julian Barnes, where he's going to be reading from his novels and some poetry.
03:04 And we just think this is a very good way of sort of showing that, you know, it works
03:11 either side. If you love the performance, if you love the literature, there is no divide.
03:17 Perfect. Well, good luck with that. It's a seriously impressive programme, Stuart. So
03:21 well done. And everything goes brilliant. Lovely to speak to you.
03:25 Thank you.
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