SE London BookFest crowdfunds for 2025 return

The SE London BookFest has launched a crowdfunding campaign to ensure its second year.

Festival organisers want to bring the community literary festival back to south-east London in autumn 2025 following its inaugural run last month.

The second SE London BookFest is aiming to host over 50 authors over four weeks and all funds raised on Kickstarter will help go towards covering some of the running costs.

As well as all the planned public events, festival organisers also want high-profile authors to go into local schools and tell their stories to hundreds of local schoolchildren.

Just like for the inaugural festival, every event will have a percentage of free tickets available. All other tickets will be priced between £3 and £5 and 50% of the proceeds from every paid-for ticket will be donated to local food banks.

The festival was set up by the team behind Peculiar Publications, who publish several newspapers in south-east London.

Co-founder of Peculiar Publications, Mark McGinlay, who also ran the SW11 Literary Festival, said: “We’re really excited to bring the SE London BookFest back to south-east London for its second year.

“In our debut year, we had over 2,500 people register to attend and the vast majority of the events sold out. Two authors even had to do additional events due to demand. Just like in 2024, many of the events planned for 2025 will continue to showcase the impressive local literary talent and give wider attention to some exciting new writers.

“We also would like to continue to work with local venues such as Peckhamplex and St Giles’ Church and independent bookshops like Chener Books, Morocco Bound and Review and Rye Books."

He added: “To ensure the festival takes place for a second successive year, we will need to get further funding. We’re very confident we can achieve this by early next year.

"If you are able to contribute financially to our Kickstarter campaign, even just by pledging a few pounds, this will help us get closer towards our funding target."

For full information about the crowdfunding campaign, visit the crowdfunder.