Garmus, Johnson, Saint and more to appear at Sevenoaks Literary Festival  

Authors such as Bonnie Garmus, Alan Johnson and Jennifer Saint have been named among the line-up for this year’s Sevenoaks Literary Festival.

Taking place between 26th September and 9th October, the 21st iteration of the festival will see Garmus speak to journalist Marianne Jones about her debut Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday), and cabinet minister turned author Johnson discuss his crime novel One of Our Ministers is Missing (Wildfire). 

Elodie Harper and Saint will be in conversation about their novels The Wolf Den (Apollo) and Elektra (Wildfire), while Annabel Abbs will be discussing her book The Language of Food (Simon & Schuster), which explores the life of Victorian cookery writer Eliza Acton. Poet Hannah Lowe will also be discussing her Costa Book of the Year, The Kids (Bloodaxe Books).

In non-fiction, Lucy Ward will consider her book The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus (Oneworld) and Peter Bradley will tell the story of one Jewish family’s fate in the Holocaust with The Last Train: A Family History of the Final Solution (HarperNorth).

Style guru and TV presenter Kat Farmer will also join author Christie Watson to explore the “messy magic” of midlife with their books Get Changed (Mitchell Beazley) and Quilt on Fire (Chatto & Windus). Musician and broadcaster Felix White will offer his love letter to cricket in  It’s Always Summer Somewhere (Cassell).

The festival is being held in association with Wildernesse House, which will be hosting its penultimate event in its library, when nature writers Ben Dark and Leif Bersweden discuss plants in urban and country settings in their books The Grove (Mitchell Beazely) and Where the Wildflowers Grow (Hodder & Stoughton). The festival will close with Susannah Constantine discussing her memoir Ready for Absolutely Nothing (Penguin Michael Joseph).

Award-winning independent Sevenoaks Bookshop, which co-ffounded the festival in 2001, will be the book retailer for the festival.

Alison Starling, the festival’s co-chair, said: “The Sunday Times recently named Sevenoaks as the best place to live in the south-east, with its cultural life and brilliant bookshop as key factors in their decision. 

“The festival’s committee of local volunteers has worked hard to curate a really varied events programme this year – whether your passion is for top-10 fiction, award-winning poetry, the magic of cricket, captivating nature writing, thought-provoking history, insightful life lessons or jaw-dropping memoir we’ve covered it.”

The full programme can be found online.