Salisbury Literary Festival: Introducing the Salisbury Greats by Tom Bromley

It's almost time for this year's Salisbury Literary Festival to begin so for the final post for this year it's my pleasure to hand the blog over to festival director Tom Bromley to introduce this year's Salisbury Greats.

One of the reasons for setting up the Salisbury Literary Festival was in order to celebrate its rich and varied literary heritage. Each year, the festival includes a Salisbury Greats strand, where we look in detail at the work of some of these authors, and the 2019 festival is no exception.

Over the centuries Salisbury and the surrounding area has provided both a setting for a number of wonderful novels, and also a home to many great writers themselves. Most recently, the playwright Barney Norris, who grew up in Salisbury, published his debut novel, Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain. At the heart of his book is the place he describes as ‘this quiet city, where the spire soars into the blue, where rivers and stories weave into one another, where lives intertwine.’

But Barney Norris is by no means the first writer to write about Salisbury. Norris attended Bishop Wordsworth’s School, which from 1945 to 1961 was famously graced with the presence of William Golding – one of the rare handful of novelists to have won both the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was while Golding was a teacher at the school that he wrote his most famous book, Lord of the Flies. However much his observations of pupil behaviour fed into that novel, the setting of Bishop Wordsworth’s certainly influenced his 1964 novel, The Spire. As well as working in such close proximity to the cathedral, Golding’s time at Bishop Wordsworth’s coincided with the rebuilding of the top of the spire between 1945 and 1951 – an echo of his own novel about the building of the medieval cathedral.

Salisbury Literary Festival: The Write Stuff with... Tom Bromley

As I live and work in Salisbury it seemed only fitting that I should run some regular features on the blog to help support and promote this year's Salisbury Literary Festival which is taking place next month.  Over the next 6 weeks I'll be running weekly features on Mondays with guest posts, Q&A's with some of the authors taking part as well as a couple of giveaways for a pair of tickets.

First up it's my my absolute pleasure to welcome festival director Tom Bromley to the blog to talk about how the Salisbury Literary Festival came about, an insight to the challenges faced with organising this year's festival and an introduction to a few of the events.

Paul Clifton Photography

There’s a great early 1980s song by the singer Jona Lewie called You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties. Jona Lewie might not have been there in this particular case, but it was in the kitchen at a friend’s party that the seeds of the Salisbury Literary were sown.

The discussion started over why Salisbury had never had a literary festival. There are lots of place near Salisbury that do – Marlborough, Winchester, Bath, even Mere, yet Salisbury was oddly absent, despite having a literary heritage that was second to none, from William Golding to Terry Pratchett, Dorothy L Sayers to Thomas Hardy. That talk became a reality and the literary festival was born.

The inaugural literary festival took place in October 2017. We tried to create a literary festival that wasn’t too ‘literary’ if that doesn’t sound too counter-intuitive, but one that felt friendly and accessible, with writers from across the genres. We wanted to focus primarily on fiction and to avoid the circuit of celebrities selling their memoirs. We wanted, too, to have a strong local content – not just celebrating the writers of Salisbury past, but those of Salisbury’s present and, through creative writing workshops, those of the future too.

There were many highlights of that first year, with a string of fantastic authors including Joanna Cannon, Sarah Winman and Gail Honeyman, but one of the highlights was undoubtedly Philippa Gregory, who drew a crowd of just under 500 in Salisbury Cathedral. We were privileged, too, to have William Golding’s daughter, Judy, talk about her father and Rob Wilkins, Terry Pratchett’s manager, speaking about his long-time friend. We were also lucky in terms of the weather and also the support of those who helped with the festival – the event is one staffed and organised entirely by volunteers, and their passion and enthusiasm helped make the festival the success it was.