We find it hard to believe that Lowdham Book Festival is ten years old. When we started in 2000 we wanted to try a
festival, and if it worked, maybe do it again. Here we are, ten years later, running Nottinghamshire’s main literature
event, and its related spin offs – Flicks in the Sticks and a Winter Weekend as well as the summer Festival.
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We have brought back some old favourites – the poets Jackie Kay and Pauline Prior-Pitt, crime writer John Harvey and
some of our “last Saturday” regulars. As always we are trying something new – a transport afternoon, a French day, a
Darwin day and some Lowdham Book Festival on Tour events in Nottingham, Caythorpe and Calverton.
In the last ten years there have been big changes in Nottinghamshire’s writing scene and we’ll be taking stock, working
out where we go from here. Last year 6,000 people attended the Festival, and around 2,500 over the Flicks weekend,
the winter weekend on biography and a storytelling season. That’s many times more people than came to the first
festival.
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None of that would be possible without financial support from Nottinghamshire County Council, Newark and Sherwood
District Council, Lowdham Parish Council, Experience Nottinghamshire, Nottingham Trent University and the Arts
Council. We have always included music, organised in recent years by Lowdham’s Warthog Promotions. There is a small
team running the Festival – Mark Gittins (technical), Ed Herington (photography), Damien Greaves (website), Jackie
Skinner (catering), Elizabeth Baguley (schools’ programme and children’s events), Sue Cole (children’s events), our
valued team of festival volunteers and especially the staff of The Bookcase. Most of the team have been around for
several and in some cases all the Festivals. Thank you. Thank you.
Since this is our tenth Festival we will allow ourselves something of an Oscars’ speech, so we also want to thank our
regular attendees, especially Friends of Lowdham Festival, the management committees of the various venues we use,
and of course our families! Audiences need writers and writers need publishers, so thanks to all those publishers who
have generously supported the Festival.
We look forward to welcoming you to this very special celebration.
Jane Streeter (The Bookcase) Ross Bradshaw (Five Leaves Publications)
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