Chipping Norton Literary Festival

STATEMENT RE CORONAVIRUS, 16 March 2020

We have had to make the wretched but inevitable decision to cancel ChipLitFest 2020. We'll be contacting our authors, audience, sponsors, partners, volunteers very soon. All customers will be due a full refund.
We are heartbroken not to be able to deliver the Festival, we had been so excited about the fantastic range of brilliant authors, speakers and illustrators due in Chipping Norton but we couldn't risk the health of those authors, the audience, the volunteers and the community.

We're very sorry to have to announce that our scheduled event to celebrate Richard Osman’s debut crime series, The Thursday Murder Club, and the publication of Mark Billingham’s twentieth thriller, Cry Baby, has had to be postponed until next year (date tbc). Chipping Norton Theatre has had to cancel all live performances this autumn; as it's such a small (but perfectly formed) venue, social distancing measures mean that the programme becomes financially unviable.

The Box Office will be in touch with ticket holders very soon to organise refunds.

From a total of 220 entries, judge Sarah Franklin has selected three winners. We had hoped, of course, to celebrate these and the other shortlisted stories with an awards event at this year's festival but it was not to be. However, we are delighted to bring the stories to this platform and hope that you enjoy them as much as we have.

Read all three stories here: the winner is Ice Cream Sunday by Jupiter Jones, second place is Bird, Man, Dog by Sean Baker and third place is Dirty Boy by James Hancock.

Thanks so much to all of you who submitted stories, to the readers who whittled the shortlist to 10, to pennyshorts.com for sponsorship, and to Sarah for judging.

Local author Eve Smith is a regular ChipLitFest supporter and participant at our writers' workshops. Junior reporter Pheebs celebrates her debut thriller, The Waiting Rooms.

Swinging from South Africa to England: one woman’s hunt for her birth mother in an all-too-believable near future in which an antibiotic crisis has decimated the population. A prescient, thrilling debut.

"The Waiting Rooms is a simply fantastic dystopia-slash-family drama; I was gripped the whole way through. It describes the devastating consequences of a global antibiotic-resistant TB pandemic through the eyes of mothers and daughters. It’s very refreshing to read from a female viewpoint, one that is often overlooked in disaster fiction. The vitality of the inner narrative brings pathos and cleverly juxtaposes the domesticity of ordinary life with the suffering in extraordinary times."

For Pheebs' full review, click here.

CELEBRATING THE BOOKS WE WOULD HAVE BROUGHT YOU:

Rachel Clarke is now at the front line of our fight against coronavirus. But earlier this year she wrote an important book. It’s hard to read now without looking through the lens of our current situation, but please do, because Dear Life brings you closer to death, but in an inspiring way.

Rachel is a campaigner, and these facts give the book even more heft and grit. But throughout, it’s the human stories that reach us; her miniature case studies instantly connecting us with her patients and their loved ones. Her clear-eyed observations, huge compassion, and enormous love and respect for her father give this book its real power. It’s a must-read for anyone likely to die. Oh, that's all of us.

For Laura Parker's full review, click here.

CELEBRATING THE BOOKS WE WOULD HAVE BROUGHT YOU:

A setting to fall in love with – Loch Doon and the surrounding Galloway hills – is the starting point and real centre of this family novel. Two A-framed holiday houses on its shore, gifted by a father to his two children, immediately reveal family differences. One, used by illustrator Elinor and teacher Patrick, is messy, worn and cosy. The other is being refashioned into a trendy eco-house by architects Fiona and Roland, who are successful in their careers but struggling in their marriage. Kirsty Wark's plot pivots on the children. The consequences of the events on the water one summer morning keep this novel rippling in all directions and through all generations. Like a Scottish loch, it’s placid on the surface but has hidden depths and long reflections. This is no vanity novel by a journalist who likes to scribble in her spare time. It’s an assured piece of writing, elevated by her delicate handling of the intricacies of grief and growing up. It’s also fully and immersively Scottish, with real life details that anyone familiar with the south of Scotland (me) will savour with a pang of delight and homesickness.

Review by Laura Parker

CELEBRATING THE BOOKS WE WOULD HAVE BROUGHT YOU:

Don’t read this novel. Listen to it instead. The audio book is narrated by the author herself, and her addictively light and lilting voice is perfectly suited to her Irish cast of characters. She loves them all, and you will too, in spite of their gradually revealed flaws and battles. These begin to unravel from the first chapter: a set-piece set-to at a family dinner party. From that starting point we are led through a year of family gatherings in a variety of locations, including a hilariously disastrous murder mystery weekend in Northern Ireland. The central links are three brothers, but this story is really about their wives. With seven children and step-children of all ages, plus a small tangle of divorces, widowhoods and some tragic hinterlands, we are drawn into a complex familial web. The dialogue is warm, witty and sweary (feck!) but it also contains subtle revelations. The menfolk are straightforward but there’s far more to the women: the bossy capable one, the warm funny one, and the beautiful arty millennial, than meets the eye. The women’s stories braid together as we discover the imperfections and self-deceptions behind their ‘grown up’ and superficially successful lives. Marian Keyes skewers and explores the obsessions and addictions of our times. At once both underrated and successful, she is a delightful companion and story-teller.

Review by Laura Parker