De Waal, Morpurgo and Butterworth to headline Sunset Festival

Authors including Kit de Waal, Michael Morpurgo and Nick Butterworth will be appearing at Wimbledon BookFest’s Sunset Festival, taking place in September.

The four-day event will also feature speakers including Dame Sheila Hancock, former governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten, the Kanneh-Mason family of classical musicians and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup.

The announcement comes as Wimbledon BookFest celebrated the attendance of 10,000 people at its two-day literary Sunrise Festival, which closed on 16th June. 

The event was headlined by Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah, and included appearances from 2021 Women’s Prize winner Susanna Clarke and Julian Barnes. Jhalak Prize writers Nikesh Shukla, Mona Arshi and Arifa Akbar shared a stage to discuss their work; while an event spotlighting new fiction by Afghan women saw participants join remotely from Afghanistan and Germany. A climate challenge panel, involving Aja Barber, Jayne Buxton and Ed Winters, debated conventional thinking on what impacts the public’s carbon footprint. 

Sunrise Festival also saw the return of BookFest’s schools programme of events, which aims to support literacy and foster a love of reading in students in Merton and neighbouring London boroughs. In total, 3,000 children attended 13 events for schools, including a headline appearance by Sir Lenny Henry alongside events with Alex Wheatle, Simon Farnaby, Elle McNicoll and former children’s laureate Jacqueline Wilson.  

“I’ve had the best time at Wimbledon BookFest," Henry said. "How wonderful to have 450 kids in a room all paying really close attention to me talking about my book, The Boy with Wings (Macmillan Children’s Books). If I’d known when I was nine that there was a place you could go to just talk about books and listen to authors talking, I would have tunnelled my way in!” 

Festival director Fiona Razvi added: “Audiences were delighted to be back sharing stories and ideas in the beautiful natural setting of Wimbledon Common. Rescheduling our festival from the autumn to the summer has given us the opportunity to rework our festival village for a stronger visitor experience. Audiences showed they had really missed the chance to connect with others, and they returned to discuss the big issues of the day, such as climate change, Ukraine and British identity, and to hear from the top names in literary fiction. We can’t wait to do it all again in September for our Sunset Festival." 

Sunset Festival will run from 22nd–25th September 2022. The full line-up will be announced at the end of July.