Chipping Norton's ChipLitFest to close after a decade due to 'funding challenges'

The trustees of the Chipping Norton Literary Festival (ChipLitFest) announced that the festival will close after a decade of bringing writers and illustrators to the Cotswold town.

Founded in 2012 by Clare Mackintosh and led by Jenny Dee since 2016, the festival has welcomed over 1,000 writers in over 550 events and delivered a schools programme to at least 10,000 children and young people. The Festival also claims to have introduced the first profit scheme for participating authors.

Liz Sich, the acting chair of trustees, said: “The current financial climate and funding challenges have sadly made it impossible to continue to stage an annual festival. The trustees would like to pay tribute to and thank the team of volunteers who have worked so hard to make ChipLitFest such a success over the years, all our supporters, partners, friends, patrons, sponsors and advertisers, and of course our authors, illustrators and interviewers."

Festival director Jenny Dee added: “Many local businesses supported the festival through sponsorship, our loyal audiences joined the Festival Friends and an unpaid team of energetic and devoted people programmed, planned and photographed the events. Our wonderful partner bookshop, Jaffé & Neale, sold heaps of books for us and, last but definitely not least, hundreds and hundreds of brilliant authors and illustrators joined us to share their wonderful words and pictures.

“It’s almost impossible to pick out just one highlight of the festival, but something that will stay with me for a very long time was learning that a student at a specialist school for excluded pupils had produced a piece of written work for the first time ever after a series of workshops led by author Bali Rai. This was part of an outreach project that we ran for several years with school-excluded pupils and looked-after young people. This kind of event was at the heart of ChipLitFest and our mission to make reading and writing truly accessible to as many people as possible.”

ChipLitFest’s grand finale will feature two events at the Chipping Norton Theatre, supported by Inkspot Publishing. The first of these will be hosted by John Finnemore on Tuesday 26th November, while on Thursday 12th December, Dr Rachel Clarke will talk about her new book, The Story of a Heart (Abacus).