- 28 May -28 June 2026
- Memoir
Death of An Ordinary Man
Sarah Perry
Death of an Ordinary Man
Saturday 06 June 2026, 2.00pm
Colchester Samaritans, Walsingham Road Community Hall, 34 Walsingham Road, Colchester, CO2 7BN
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2026
Winner of the Nero Non-Fiction Award 2025
A Book of the Year for The Times, Guardian, Financial Times and Observer.
Festival Patron Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man is a deeply moving, unstinting account of death by cancer, a reportage into the daily experience of caring, and most importantly a testament to her father-in-law David’s life, that of an ordinary man.
Sarah Perry’s father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. He was in some ways a very ordinary man: he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels and his local church. Yet as Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David through his final days, they realised how extraordinary he really was.
This loving, clear-eyed and unforgettable book shows how death may be met and understood as a part of life – a universal experience that is terrible and beautiful, intimate and real, sometimes all at once.
Sarah Perry will be in-conversation with James McDermott.
Tickets: £10 / £8 (students, under 27s and unwaged)
Box Office: essexbookfestival.org.uk or Mercury Theatre 01206 573948
This event is part of our Love & Loss day of events at Colchester Samaritans on Saturday 06 June.
Event Information
💬 The event will include an audience Q&A session.
📚 Copies of the book will be available to purchase on the day.
🖊️ After the event there will be an opportunity to get the book signed by the author.
🪑 Seats are unallocated.
☕ Colchester Samaritans are kindly offering refreshments at this event – donations to Samaritans welcome.
🚗 There is limited free parking at the school next to the hall. Parking details will be sent to ticket-holders a few days before the event. The nearest public car park is St Johns Multi Storey which is opposite the Samaritans Hall on the other side of Southway or St Mary’s Multi Storey is a 10 minute walk away.
♿ The venue is wheelchair accessible. There are disabled facilities on site.
Sarah Perry
Photo of Sarah Perry © Sophie Davidson
Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Enlightenment, Melmoth, The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year Award and the British Book of the Year Award. Enlightenment was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 and her other work has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Death of an Ordinary Man
An unflinching and profoundly moving account of caring until death, from Booker-Prize-longlisted Sarah Perry.
Sarah Perry’s father-in-law, David, died at home nine days after a cancer diagnosis and having previously been in the good health. The speed of his illness outstripped that of the NHS and social care, so the majority of nursing fell to Sarah and her husband. They witnessed what happens to the body and spirit, hour by hour, as it approaches death.
Death of an Ordinary Man is an unstinting account of death by cancer, a reportage into the daily experience of caring, an exploration of the structural conditions of dying in the UK, and most importantly a testament to David’s life, that of an ordinary man.
Unflinching and profoundly moving, Sarah Perry confronts the taboo surrounding death and shows us how to confront all of the terror and beauty that comes with the end of life – and how the saddest thing she has ever seen is also the best thing she’s ever done.
Now I understand there are no ordinary lives – that every death is the end of a single event in time’s history: an event so improbable as to be miraculous, and irreplaceable in every particular.
In Death of an Ordinary Man, Sarah Perry brings her Booker-shortlisted novelists eye to her first full length work of non-fiction. A genre defying work of extraordinary empathy and power with all the qualities that make her fiction so compelling.
