News

Community Arts Festival of the Year 2024

We are delighted to have been awarded the ‘Community Arts Festival of the Year, West Sussex‘ by Prestige Awards.

The Cuckfield Bookfest aims to enrich the cultural life of the area by providing locals of all ages with the opportunity to engage with and be inspired by these authors and poets and through them, the process of writing and creativity.

We also have strong links with the local community including schools, local and renowned authors, poets and local businesses.

Cuckfield Bookfest 2025 will be 3rd – 5th October. Save the date!

Children’s Writing Competition 2024

For this year’s writing competition we invited submissions from children aged 7-13 on the theme of space and exploration, in celebration of World Space Week which coincided with Bookfest. We were delighted to receive 200+ entries from more than 10 different schools. Our judges were extremely impressed with the variety of writing styles and forms and the incredible imaginations of the children.

You can view the winning entries here.

Dominic Holland is perhaps best known as a comedian but he has written several books including a series of comic essays, Takes on Life, which cover his life and yours, teasing out the idiosyncrasies which plague us all. His latest novel Open Links is rooted in golf.

Who doesn’t love ABBA? It’s 50 years since they won the Eurovision Song Contest. Giles Smith, writer and music fan sets out to find out why the group has remained bigger than ever. It’s his way of saying ‘thank you for the music’. The Spectator said ‘at last a book that’s worthy of ABBA’.

For over two decades, Lara Maiklem has scoured the banks of the Thames to find objects – lost or discarded – that tell the greatest stories. In A Mudlarking Year, she reflects on a year of her life searching the foreshore of the Thames.

Lara will be in conversation with Helen Chandler-Wilde who in Lost & Found, offers nine life-changing lessons from someone who lost everything.

Big Book Group 2024

We have chosen the book for the Big Book Group – the intriguingly named Confession with Blue Horses by Sophie Hardach.

Tobi and Ella’s childhood in East Berlin is shrouded in mystery. Now adults living in London, their past is full of unanswered questions. Both remember their family’s daring and terrifying attempt to escape. But what happened next? Where did their parents disappear to, and why? What happened to Heiko, their little brother? And was there ever a painting of three blue horses?

The Guardian called it ‘an absorbing slow burn of a book that not only casts light on Germany’s recent history but depicts, with careful tenderness, a family simultaneously torn apart by ideology and bound by powerful ties of love.’

Sophie Hardach is a German-born writer and journalist living in London.

Confession with Blue Horses was short-listed for the Costa prize. We hope that by announcing the title for the Big Book Group now, groups can incorporate it into their programme for the year.