LitFest speaker announced

By Amanda Wilkins - 21 January 2025

Arts and CultureAttractions
  • Sir Alan Hollinghurst, 2025 Golding Speaker

    Sir Alan Hollinghurst, 2025 Golding Speaker

Marlborough LitFest has announced that the award-winning novelist, Sir Alan Hollinghurst will be its 2025 Golding Speaker.

Marlborough LitFest hosts an annual Golding Speaker to highlight the town’s long connection with the Nobel Laureate and Booker Prize winner, William Golding, at an event sponsored by William Golding Limited. 

This years speaker, Alan Hollinghurst, is the author of six previous novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair. He received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours list for services to literature. 

Hollinghurst will be appearing at Marlborough LitFest on Friday 26 September at Marlborough Town Hall.

William Golding’s daughter, Judy Carver, said: “We are so pleased to be associated with such a brilliant and ground-breaking novelist. A really exciting choice.”

Mary-Vere Parr, chair of LitFest, said: “I am a huge admirer of Alan Hollinghurst’s work and can’t wait to welcome him to LitFest. We are so fortunate to have the support of William Golding Ltd to bring such a wonderful novelist to Marlborough.”

This year’s festival will feature a varied programme of events for all ages including fiction, non-fiction, poetry and the annual Big Town Read. The festival aims to champion new, upcoming writers as well as established names and also encourage a love of reading in children and young people with author talks, competitions and our ongoing community outreach programme. Further confirmed authors and events will be released over the coming months.

The festival will take place between Thursday 25 September to Sunday 28 September.

A spokesperson for the event said: “If you want to avoid the disappointment of a sold-out festival event, do consider becoming Friend of Marlborough LitFest. For £30 for the year you'll receive priority booking for LitFest events and you'll be supporting the festival, helping with our running costs and enabling our outreach programme in and around Marlborough.”
 

More information and sign up here

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