Chip­ping Nor­ton Lit­er­ary Festival

2024 CHIPLITFEST SHORT STORY COMPETITION

Huge congratulations to our three winners:

First: Blighty One by Chloe Banks

Second: An Evening With Rodney McGraw by Sarah Price

Third: Miss Mansfield by Victoria Stewart

Please click on each title to read these amazing stories and find out more about the authors.

Enormous thanks to our judge: Jo Unwin and sponsor: HW Fisher

We received 213 entries from all across the UK and Ireland, USA, France, Germany, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan.

• First Prize: £500 + the chance to meet with Jo Unwin Literary Agency at Somerset House in London to discuss your writing career.
• Second Prize: £100
• Third Prize: £50

Jo Unwin Literary Agency Ltd (JULA) is a dynamic literary agency based at Somerset House in London. The agency represents debut and best-selling authors published in the UK, US and internationally.

We are delighted that Jo Unwin is joining us as the judge of the 2024 short story competition. At the festival we have regularly worked with Jo's clients such as Brian Bilston, Kit de Waal, Lucy Easthope, and Nadia Shireen as well as Jo herself who has provided a number of invaluable workshop sessions for aspiring writers.

As well as judging the competition, JULA are also offering the winner the chance to meet at the agency at Som­er­set House in Lon­don to dis­cuss your writ­ing career.

We're incredibly grateful that HW Fisher is returning as our competition sponsor.

You write the books and leave us to keep them

HW Fish­er is a top 30 char­tered accoun­tan­cy firm which has been advis­ing authors and jour­nal­ists for many years, help­ing them to man­age their finances. We pro­vide expert accoun­tan­cy, audit, tax, cor­po­rate and finan­cial advi­so­ry ser­vices to high-pro­file entre­pre­neur­ial SMEs, large cor­po­rates and high net-worth indi­vid­u­als. We keep it per­son­al by enabling you to con­cen­trate on express­ing your tal­ent while depend­ing on ours for accoun­tan­cy and finan­cial planning.

Chipping Norton Literary Festival is taking a moment to reset. This means that in 2024 we will not be running our full four-day programme of events in April.

We will continue to run our schools outreach programme, in line with our core charitable mission to promote literacy to school-age children, and inspire a love of books.

We’ll also hold one-off events such as author talks and writing workshops over the course of the year, as well as our immensely popular short story competition, due to open for entries very shortly.

We’ll be dedicating our efforts to fundraising, so that in April 2025 we will be able to come back stronger than ever for a full festival weekend.

In the meantime, we will do all we can to retain the immense goodwill that ChipLitFest has generated among authors, audiences, volunteers and throughout the town, which we appreciate hugely.

Look out for news of events and initiatives, and keep reading and writing!

Still smiling - here are the Festival committee members on the steps of the Town Hall at the close of the ChipLitFest 2023.

This year's festival built on the 2022 festival, reminding audiences to trust that live literary events will go ahead and that they can book tickets in advance! We still had to hold our nerve as audiences have changed their buying habits but we were delighted by the high number of sold out events.
The festival week began with visits to 16 schools - nursery, primary, secondary and special - from a team of eight authors delivering brilliant fun workshops.
From Thurs 27 to Sun 30 April, we then hosted 54 events involving 69 authors and 13 interviewers. Approx 3,000 tickets were sold, audiences from age 3 upwards were entertained all weekend by amazing authors. People laughed, cried, learned, met their literary heroes, discovered new ones and bought 100s and 100s of books.

The festival is community-run, the organising committee are all volunteers and give their time and energy to bringing this amazing festival to Chipping Norton. Many thanks to all the Chippy residents and businesses for their support and see you in 2024.