This year Chester Literature Festival celebrates its 30^th anniversary with 128 events from 9-30 November 2019, featuring major authors, storytellers, broadcasters and poets with performance and discussion across the festival.

Authors Armistead Maupin and Michael Morpurgo, poets Imtiaz Dharker, Benjamin Zephaniah and Lemn Sissay and writer and TV presenter Nadiya Hussain top the bill alongside a raft of writers, storytellers, musicians and spoken word artists.

“We are delighted to bring such a rich programme to Chester in the Chester Literature Festival’s 30th anniversary year. Our artist in residence Imtiaz Dharker has produced stunningly beautiful illustrations and words for our walls and we can’t wait to bring her curated events to life. This year we explore cultural identity across our programme, with themes of ethnicity, religion, disability and physicality, generation, sexuality and gender, class, parenthood and the care system, and belonging and displacement in all their forms. We hope you’ll find a home at Storyhouse during this year’s festival.”
– Sam Bain, Senior Programme Manager, Storyhouse.

Chester Literature Festival throughout the years

Chester Literature Festival is one of the UK’s oldest literature festivals. It was established in 1989 by volunteer organisation Chester Arts 89 and booksellers in the city. They programmed a week of activity with a line-up that included a reading by DH Lawrence’s niece. Storyhouse have programmed the festival since 2012. Artist-in-residences have included Ted Hughes Prize-winner Hollie McNish and Sunday Times-bestselling author Lemn Sissay, both of whom have had poems adorning the walls, floors, windows, nooks and crannies of Storyhouse. Lemn’s poems can still be found throughout the building, until Imtiaz Dharker’s poems arrive in November.