The next two-day Festival is 10th & 11th October 2025.
The next two-day Festival is 10th & 11th October 2025.
Cranbrook Literature Festival was delighted to host three one off events during 2024.
Elly Griffiths spoke to a packed Vestry Hall in May about her hugely popular Dr Ruth Galloway mystery novels. The Reverend Richard Coles entertained an enormous audience in St Dunstan’s Church in June and talked about his writing career and his inspiration for his best-selling Canon Daniel Clement murder mystery books. In October Clare Chambers spoke to loyal, and new fans, about her novels and in particular the phenomenally successful ‘Small Pleasures’ and her new novel ‘Shy Creatures’.
Cranbrook Literature Festival:
A celebration of books, reading and writing in Cranbrook
Cranbrook Literature Festival, established in 2016, is a two-day, biennial event to promote the joy of the written word to children and adults across the Weald of Kent. We are a not-for-profit organisation run totally by volunteers. Our Festival programme offers a great mix of authors and poets, both well known and up-and-coming, plus writing competitions, creative writing workshops and a well-stocked pop-up bookshop. We are proud to finance the cost of visits by children’s authors to local schools from festival revenue.
The National Literacy Trust published a report in 2020 which indicates that author visits to schools have a positive effect on children and young people’s reading and writing skills and aids their enjoyment and confidence in both. School budgets don’t always stretch to visiting authors or writing workshops and this is where Cranbrook Literature Festival can help.
The reason why we do what we do…
Thank you to children’s author Rachel Burge who came to Cranbrook and Sissinghurst Primary Schools
on 14th October to talk to pupils about her new book Whispering Hollow.
Children’s author Rachel Burge visited Cranbrook and Sissinghurst Primary Schools in October to talk to pupils about her new book Whispering Hollow, how she became an author and her experience as a writer of spooky stories.
Rachel spent time with some of the pupils at both schools, and divulged tips on crafting edge-of-your-seat-scary scenes and presented a workshop detailing tips and techniques on ‘how to write your own scary story’.
Cranbrook Literature Festival financed Rachel’s visit and gifted some of Rachel’s books, as well as other scary stories, to the schools and provided prizes for a creative writing competition.
Thank you so much to everyone who came to support Cranbrook Literature Festival on 11th October
and of course to Clare Chambers, who was so open and honest about her writing.
Thank you so much to everyone who came to support Cranbrook Literature Festival on 19th June
and of course to The Reverend Richard Coles, who was so witty and charismatic.
The Cranbrook Literature Festival welcomed the Reverend Richard Coles to an 'in conversation' event on 19th June in St Dunstan's Church, Cranbrook. The church was packed with a sell out audience and Richard was in great form talking about his 'cosy crime' books featuring Canon Daniel Clement. The third in the series (Murder at the Monastery) had just been published and, after an informative and amusing chat with festival chairperson, Christine Newman, Richard did a reading from the book followed by a Q&A session and an incredibly long signing session.
“I’ve always loved crime fiction. The first proper book I ever got when I was a boy was the Sherlock Holmes short stories from my grandfather. I actually made my parents buy me a deerstalker and I used to wear it around Kettering and was obviously beaten up daily – and rightly so. But I was fascinated by this idea of an enigmatic figure on the edge of things, who sees what others don’t see and puts right things that have gone wrong”.
“I’ve got into the pattern now: the day I finish a book, literally, I start the next one because I like to keep my discipline”.
Thank you so much to everyone who came to support Cranbrook Literature Festival on 10th May and of course to Elly Griffiths, who was so open, inspiring and friendly about her writing.
Over 100 fans of crime writing filled the Vestry Hall, Cranbrook on Friday 10th June to hear the wonderful Elly Griffiths speak about her crime books in the Dr Ruth Galloway series (15 in total), her Brighton mystery books and the many stand-alone novels also crafted by her.
Elly was in conversation with the chairman of the Cranbrook Literature Festival, Christine Newman, and during the evening the audience learnt about where Elly’s inspiration comes from, what her work schedule is like, the crucial input from her editor and her plans for future novels.
Elly said that she doesn’t always have a written plan for her books but writes a little bit of the next chapter after completing a previous chapter. She has taken to heart advice from writer E L Doctorow who said that planning like that is like driving in the dark with your headlights on; you can only see a bit of the road, but you can make the whole journey like that.
Her writing regime involves shutting herself away in her writing shed with lots of strong coffee and trying to write at least 1000 words a day until she has the basic manuscript and then and only then does she go back and change things.
The evening finished with a Q&A session and book signing and Elly told the audience that she has a book of short stories coming out soon – including one about Ruth and Nelson – plus a new book early next year which is about time travel.
“Planning is like driving in the dark with your headlights on; you can only see a bit of the road, but you can make the whole journey like that.”
