News

As August closes, our Festival programme opens: full details will be posted here on the website on Monday 31 August, and our brochure will be hitting the streets at around the same time. Friends of the Festival qualify for Priority Booking, so if you haven’t considered joining before, now is definitely a good time to […]

If you have been hankering after a taste of the High Life recently, we have some great news: it’s coming to Wells in October! Those glamorous and interesting lives that other people seem to enjoy…what are they really like behind the scenes? This year’s Festival allows us to have an intriguing peek – in a […]

After an extremely tough year, we can reassure you of some bright spots ahead. Still committed to putting on a Festival in October, whilst adhering to government guidelines and advice, we have an excellent programme planned. And to illustrate our commitment to 2020 we have several ‘anniversary’ events to reveal. Most relevant to Somerset will […]

After a bumper crop of entries from all over the world, our International Competitions have now closed for this year. But they will be back in 2021. Almost twice as many entries have arrived this year as we received in 2019 and the quality looks excellent. Our judges are in for a challenging few weeks! […]

This year’s record-breaking International Competitions (most ever entries, biggest prize-money) have been leading the way for our 2020 Festival by attracting more entries from more countries than ever before. And with October not far away, our plans for the Festival itself look set to copy that pattern by also making our superb programme more widely […]

We are delighted to announce that Max Porter will be our author for the Festival’s ever popular Book Group Event, due to take place at 2.30pm on Sunday 18 October. Max’s first book Grief is the Thing with Feathers attracted a string of accolades and awards, including Young Writer of the Year. His second, Lanny, […]

With the current situation still so uncertain, we would like to reassure you of one certainty: our intention is still to hold our annual festival – our 28th – one way or another. We have already almost finalised the programme and to illustrate our determination, we are announcing one of our speakers here and now! […]

The first day of April is a very familiar date! But as far as Wells Festival of Literature is concerned, that’s because it’s the day our competitions traditionally open. And this year, despite all the change and uncertainty around us, is no exception – we are delighted to declare our competitions officially open. Entries can […]

The 27th Wells Festival of Literature opened yesterday evening with a packed audience at a sell-out event – Diarmaid MacCulloch’s fascinating revelations about Thomas Cromwell. Following the life of Cromwell, we were treated to the life of Johnny Normal, brought to us by his dad Henry. This brilliant and inspirational talk about life with an […]

We are sorry to report that Peter Hennessy, who was due to speak at a Literary Lunch on Friday 25 October, has had to pull out of the Festival for health reasons. Lord Hennessy was due to discuss his book Winds of Change with Festival Patron William Waldegrave and we are very grateful to Lord […]