Patrick Grant, Steve Foote, and Baroness Shami Chakrabarti are the first guest speakers for the 2025 Literary Festival, which gets underway today.
The annual celebration of the arts will feature 52 public events between today and 4 May, covering entertainment, music, art, food, fiction, poetry, history, politics and sport as well as debates on artificial intelligence and smart phones and a gardeners’ question time.
Also planned for the Festival, are 15 Education Programme events and five outreach and community events including musical theatre and a children’s tea party.
Festival Director Claire Allen is “delighted with the range of speakers and events we have this year”.
“I really think there is something for everybody,” she said.
“As well as our many main speakers, we have a selection of local author events and writing workshops, an international poetry competition, and outreach activities in care homes and the prison. We are excited to offer a variety of family events, a schools programme and a writing competition for local students.”
Festival Honorary Chairman Sir Terry Waite KCMG, CBE, said the Festival is very important to Guernsey, because not only does it make a significant contribution to the cultural life of the island, “but it also aids the economy by bringing many new visitors”.
The Festival open today with fashion designer and Great British Sewing Bee TV presenter Patrick Grant speaking at St James at lunchtime.
His book; ‘Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish – How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier’ focuses on the crisis of consumption and quality in fashion and how he thinks we might make ourselves happier by rediscovering the joy of living with fewer, better-quality things.
This evening local author Steve Foote will speak about the war time diaries of Hans Max von Aufsess at the Guille Alles Library.
The commanding officer of the German Civilian Administration was based in the Channel Islands during the Occupation. Mr Foote will discuss his book ‘Gentle Violence’.
Those two events sold out well in advance of the Festival opening, but tickets are still available (at the time of writing) for tonight’s talk by human rights campaigner Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, at St James.
She will present ‘The Case for the Defence’ in an exploration of human rights.
The Guernsey Literary Festival is a registered charity.
Festival Director, Mrs Allen thanked “everyone who has contributed to making this Festival possible: our dedicated team, volunteers, loyal sponsors, partners, patrons and members. Also, many thanks to the various venues, event suppliers, publishers and media partners that support us. Come and join us and relish all that the Guernsey Literary Festival has to offer.”
The full programme for the 2025 Guernsey Literary Festival is available on the festival website guernseyliteraryfestival.com.
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A longer form version of this article appeared in the April/May edition of CONNECT including profiles of many of the visiting and local authors and guest speakers involved in the 2025 Guernsey Literary Festival.