Literature goes back to school

ANEW literary festival launches next week—at a girls’ prep school. Hanford School in Child Okeford, Dorset, considers reading ‘the heart of a good education’ and is celebrating books in style from Monday, June 19 to June 24.

‘We’d been thinking about having a literary festival for a while and, with our 70th anniversary coming up in July, this seemed exactly the right time to do it,’ says Carrie Lewis, the school’s head of English and the driving force behind the event.

The festival’s programme comprises talks, storytelling and workshops and Mrs Lewis has gathered a strong line-up of speakers, including Emma Carroll, the author of Strange Star, the Financial Times’s children’s book of the year in 2016.

Daytime events are open to all local schools but five evening talks will welcome the general public. In the inaugural talk, on June 20, Santa Montefiore—an old Hanford girl—will reveal the people and places that inspire her writing. Later in the week, the New York Times best-selling author Natasha Solomons will consider literary landscapes—specifically Thomas Hardy’s Dorset—and Joanna Trollope, a former Hanford parent, will explain how to adapt Jane Austen to today.

Damien Lewis and Philip Reeve will bring the festival to a close, with the former talking about what it means to write for film and television and the latter discussing his ‘Railhead’ science-fiction series.

For tickets and information, visit www.hanford.dorset.sch. uk/news/literary-festival