Clare Conville launches literary festival

Clare Conville, director of Conville & Walsh, has set up a literary and music festival in East Anglia with rare book dealer and close friend Simon Finch.

The Voewood Literary Festival, billed as "The Literary Garden Party of the Year", will take place at Finch's own house and gardens, an arts and crafts house in Holt, North Norfolk. Events will be hosted over three days, 27th-29th August.

Authors taking part include Diana Athill, Louis de Bernieres, D B C Pierre, Meg Rosoff and S J Watson, with musicians from Adam Ant, Nick Harper and Beth Orton, among others, performing in the evenings. Hire Intelligence, Conville & Walsh's speakers' agency, is sponsoring one of the tents, with Conville saying further support had come from "private funds". The Guardian newspaper is also hosting a Guardian Masterclass Tent, with authors including Sarah Hall and John Niven giving classes on how to write.

Conville said she and Finch had worked on everything together and hoped the festival would become an annual event: "It's going well and I'm just keeping my fingers crossed," she said.

The maximum number of tickets available for any one day was 900, including the musical events, with tickets on sale at www.voewoodfestival.com. Full weekend tickets are priced £145, with individual day, evening and full day tickets also available, for £45, £25 and £65 respectively.

Conville added the impetus for creating the event was that Finch had always wanted to start a festival, and the pair met up earlier in the year and started planning, on the basis that "there isn't a festival like this in Norfolk".

In setting up a festival, Conville joins fellow book-trade figure Ottakar’s founder James Heneage, who held the inaugural Chalke Valley History Festival in Wiltshire in July this year.