Chip­ping Nor­ton Lit­er­ary Festival

Hugely excited to announce the ChipLitFest annual festival weekend is back! Following our mini autumn run of live events, we will be back in Chipping Norton 21 - 24 April 2022 for brilliant bookish events. Can't wait to see you all. We'll keep in touch.

Thanks so much to our audience and authors for getting involved in our short series of live literary events. Knowing that people felt confident enough to be back out in person to enjoy some top quality bookish chat encouraged us to commit to a full festival in 2022. Many thanks to these brilliant writers and their wonderful books: Claire Mackintosh, Julie Bindel, Ian Dunt, Mark Billingham, Richard Osman and Hugo Rittson Thomas. And to Chipping Norton Theatre for hosting the events and to Jaffé & Neale for organising the book sales.

We are very excited to announce the winners of the sixth ChipLitFest short story competition! Sponsored by HW Fisher, we received 248 entries from across the world.

The standard of submission seemed higher than ever, in fact we weren't able to get the shortlist down to ten stories so our judge, literary agent Isobel Dixon, had to make her selection from 12 stories. In turn, Isobel was very reluctant to exclude a fourth story so we awarded a Highly Commended category.

Thanks to all the writers who got involved, to our readers, to our sponsor and to our judge. And many congratulations to our four winners, read their fantastic stories here.

First place, winner of £500, A Place in the Sun by John Budden

Second place, winner of £100, I Used to Live Here Once by MS Clary

Third place, winner of £50, Requiem for a Woolwich Canary by Sarah Doyle

Highly Commended, winner of £50, Waiting for the Light by D Dignam

The top 25 chartered accountancy firm, HW Fisher, is joining the festival's list of loyal and generous supporters to become the new sponsor for our short story competition. We are really thrilled about this new working relationship with HW Fisher, it's a perfect match between festival and business as HW Fisher specialises in advising authors and journalists, helping them to manage their finances. They are keen litfest attenders and we look forward to welcoming the team to Chipping Norton as soon as possible.

HW Fisher's generous sponsorship means that we are now in a position to offer free entries to those writers on a low income. Eight people were able to take advantage of this free entry in the 2021 ChipLitFest short story competition.