It is always a pleasure to welcome back Festival patron and multi-award-winning Essex author Sarah Perry who was born and grew up in Chelmsford back to Essex Book Festival. This time it is particularly poignant as Sarah joins our special Love & Loss event at Colchester Samaritans Community Centre on Saturday 6 June. Sarah will be talking about her latest book Death Of Ordinary Man, Winner of the Nero Book Awards Non-Fiction Award 2025.
Sarah Perry’s father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he’d been a healthy and happy man: he loved stamp-collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was.
Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day-by-day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives.
This is not a book about grief: it is about family, and care and love. In the words of writer Rachel Clarke “Please read this book. It may very well change how you live.”
Another Essex author to look out for during the Festival is Lesley Kara, best-selling author of The Rumour (the UK’s bestselling crime fiction debut in 2019 and Channel 5’s adaptation – starring Emily Atack and Rachel Shenton aired in late 2025).
Lesley, who was also born and grew up in Chelmsford, will be talking to fellow Essex author Christine Penhall about her sharp and incisive new novel Troublemaker at Grays Library on Tuesday 2 June. Troublemaker is a masterful psychological thriller which asks: how do you solve a murder when no one believes it took place? How indeed!
Then, of course, we have another best-selling novelist, former television presenter and activist Syd Moore, again also born in Essex, coming to Harlow Museum on the 27 June to talk about her latest novel The Great Deception. Set in Iceland, The Great Deception conjures a world of espionage, mystery and illusion in a war-torn world. Syd is also running Writing the Archive Workshop using the Museum’s collection as inspiration.
Essex Book Festival launches this week so if you have your eye on an event or two, now is the time to get booking!