2015 GOLDING SPEAKER ANNOUNCED FOR MARLBOROUGH LITFEST

(2-4 OCTOBER)

Salley Vickers will be headlining the first night of Marlborough LitFest 2015 in October, as this year’s Golding Speaker. The LitFest hosts an annual Golding Speaker to highlight Marlborough’s long connection with the Nobel Laureate and Booker Prize winner, William Golding, at an event sponsored by the William Golding estate. Past Golding Speakers have included Louis de Bernieres, Fay Weldon and Harold Jacobson.

The festival programme is being finalised but will feature the best in excellent writing - both fiction and non-fiction - as well as offering poetry events, creative writing workshops and children’s authors and events, all held in Marlborough over the weekend of October 2-4.

Salley is the bestselling author of books including Miss Garnett’s Angel, Mr Golightly’s Holiday, The Other Side of You and The Cleaner of Chartres. She was winner of the 2007 IMPAC Dublin award and judge of the Man Booker Prize in 2002. Novelist Philip Pullman believes that Salley has “a presence worth cherishing in the ranks of modern novelists”; The Washington Post commented: “if you enjoy the work of…Penelope Fitzgerald, Jamees Salter or Anita Brookner, you should be reading Vickers. All these authors reflect with grace and gravity on life’s moments of sorrowful epiphany.”

Salley won a state scholarship to St Paul’s Girl’s School and went on to read English at Cambridge University. She has worked variously as a cleaner, dancer, artist’s model, a teacher of children with special needs, a university lecturer of literature and, for 15 years, as a psychoanalyst in the NHS. She now writes full time and lectures particularly on the connections between art, literature, psychology and religion.

Festival Chairman, Jan Williamson, said: “We are thrilled that Salley Vickers will be appearing as this year’s Golding Speaker. Salley is best known for her first novel Miss Garnet’s Angel. She’s a novelist full of the unexpected, whose characters wrestle with life’s problems.”

The 2015 LitFest line-up includes: Alexander McCall Smith; novelist and poet Helen Dunmore; bestselling novelist and our Big Town Read author, Rachel Joyce; novelist and journalist Andrew O’Hagan; poet, novelist and playwright, Adam Thorpe; Guardian journalist and critic John Crace; fantasy/sci-fi/comedy/crime writer Jasper Fforde; historical biographer and novelist Alison Weir and the broadcaster, arts critic, novelist and human rights journalist, Bidisha. BAFTA-award winning director Peter Kosminsky will also be in discussion with Channel 4 broadcaster Jon Snow to talk about the recent TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novels of Wolf Hall.

The Marlborough LitFest committee would like to thank our Founder Sponsor ALCS Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, lead sponsor Brewin Dolphin and events sponsors Hiscox Insurance, and Duncan Morris Solicitors for their continued support.