Huddersfield Literature Festival returns next week with an exciting line-up

“It’s a very exciting line-up this year, we are really pleased with it,” says festival director Michelle Hodgson. “We got a little more funding from the Arts Council this year and also some support from Kirklees Year of Music and we are doing a number of music-related events including live music at our launch, as well as workshops on songwriting and performing rap, and music critic John Aizlewood will be talking about his new book Radiohead: Life in a Glasshouse.” Continuing the music theme there is a pop-up exhibition entitled Worst Record Covers in the Festival Hub showcasing Huddersfield record collector Steve Goldman’s quirky collection of unusual and unintentionally humorous record covers, described as ‘so bad they are awesome.’

Other headliners included in the programme are bestselling Yorkshire novelists Milly Johnson and Linda Green who will be discussing their latest books, crime fiction writers Penny Batchelor and Nell Pattison, and Labour MP Lisa Nandy, Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities who will be discussing her timely and resonant non-fiction book All In: How We Build a Country That Works.

“We have got quite a few events on the state of the world,” says Hodgson. “We are really pleased to have Lisa Nandy coming along and we also have Sam Bright discussing his book Fortress London about how London tends to get all the funding and interest and the rest of the country gets left behind. Stuart Maconie will be talking about his new book The Full English in which he follows in the footsteps of J B Priestley’s 1930s classic English Journey, travelling through England. He will be in conversation about the state of the country and looking at how to make things better for everyone. I think there will be a lot of interesting and lively debate about his book.” Several of the events this year are hybrid ones – with live-streaming so that people who are not able to attend in person can still participate. The festival recently won the Accessible and Inclusive Tourism award at the 2022 Yorkshire Post Tourism Awards – and accessibility is high on the festival team’s list of priorities. “We are working with Kirklees Local TV on the hybrid events,” says Hodgson. “We started looking at doing some online events even before lockdown, then during lockdown we had a purely online festival. We now want to increase our hybrid and online provision to broaden our reach and promote accessibility. We are committed to keeping that going.”

Ticket prices are being kept as low as possible too in order to make the festival accessible to as many people as possible. “We know that people may be struggling with the cost-of-living crisis, so we are trying to keep a proportion of our tickets free or low cost,” says Hodgson. “We have a whole day of free family activities on March 18 with lots of entertainment, workshops, storytelling. And there are other events that are free for children during the festival.” This year the festival has also been able to take on a schools co-ordinator for the first time. “We are really excited about that,” says Hodgson. “We have a whole programme of events for schools which includes a special event with CBeebies’ George Webster and a wide range of assemblies, workshops and author talks. We are working with a number of schools around Huddersfield and we would like to keep developing that.”

Huddersfield Literature Festival, March 23-April 2. huddlitfest.org.uk