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June 2021
June 6, 2021 @ 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
  • Discussion
  • Festival Launch
  • Non-fiction
  • ONLY A FEW TICKETS LEFT!

Festival Launch – We need to talk about Essex Girls

Sarah Perry, Syd Moore, Sadie Hasler

Join us for the Launch event of the 2021 festival with the amazing Women of Essex: Sarah Perry, Patron of Essex Book Festival, Syd Moore, Writer, Co- founder of the Essex Girls Liberation Front, Sadie Hasler, Playwright, Journalist and Director of Old Trunk Theatre Company, and honorary Essex Girl, Festival Director Ros Green, who will be discussing what it means to be an Essex Girl: the jokes, the misconceptions, and the strengths and growing movements that are starting to challenge… Read more

June 2022
Hosepipe Band and Blake Morrison March 2022 3x2
June 1, 2022 @ 7:30 pm - 9:15 pm
  • Festival Launch
  • Music
  • Performance
  • Poetry

Launch Event: The Ballad of Shingle Street and other East Anglian poems

Blake Morrison and The Hosepipe Band

A performance of poetry with music featuring poet and novelist Blake Morrison accompanied by music composed and played by the multi-instrumentalist members of The Hosepipe Band. Read more

June 2023
June 2, 2023 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
  • Festival Launch
  • Memoir

Launch Event – An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals

Polly Toynbee

We are delighted to be launching this year's Essex Book Festival with Guardian columnist and broadcaster Polly Toynbee. One of the most respected, prolific, and razor-sharp voices in social commentary uses the prism of her extraordinary family to examine the true state of class in Britain. Read more

May 2025
Photo of Ben Okri with book cover image for Madame Sosostris
May 28 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
  • Festival Launch
  • Fiction

Launch Event: Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken Hearted

Ben Okri in conversation with Jak Peake

Part vision, part mystery, this story of a midsummer night’s madness, in multi-award-winning poet, playwright and novelist Ben Okri’s inimitable style, is as alive with echoes and reverberations as the enchanted forest itself. Read more