The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival
For full details visit cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature
MONTP ELLIER WALK
On top of our packed programme of Festival events, there’s plenty more to discover for all the family in our Festival Village – and for FREE!
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THE DEN
Picnic Area & Street Food
Waterstones Children’s Festival Bookshop
The Times Forum The Inkpot
Box Office
The Times & TLS
Saturday 14 October, 10.30am–12.30pm
Street Food
Wishing Fish Clock
Picnic Area Playground
Storytelling and crafting with author Miranda Walker.
On both Festival weekends… 7–8 & 14–15 October 12.30pm–1.30pm
Mural & Make 4.30pm–5pm
Harry Potter Family Quiz
Lit Crawl – 7 October 2017
With illustrator Abbie Cameron.
The Sunday Times Garden Theatre
5pm until late cheltenhamfestivals.com #cheltlitfest
How to Draw Animals
Street Food Bonne Maman
Nespresso
The Gardens Gallery Skate Park
Panto Workshop Sunday 8 October, 1.30pm–3.30pm
The Huddle
Beyond Words The Den
The Bookstand
Sunday 8 October, 10.30am–12.30pm
Run by the Everyman Theatre.
Feast Café Waterstones Bookshop
With author and illustrator Lucy Cousins.
Fantastic drawing fun with author and illustrator Sarah McIntyre.
The Nook
Main Entrance
Big Bird Mural
Pug-a-Doodle Do!
Hospitality Lounge
The Woodland Trust Wild Wood
The Famous Five story trail
Saturday 7 October, 10.30am–12.30pm
Saturday 7 October, 1.30pm–3.30pm
The Hive
FREE EVENTS
FREE ACTIVITIES IN THE FESTIVAL VILLAGE
MONTPEL LIER SPA R OA
MONTPELLIER TERRACE Saturday 14 October, 1.30–2.30pm
Paintasaurus Workshop Get creative with the team from The Wilson. Sunday 15 October, 10.30am–12.30pm
The Wild Wood Band
Beyond Words: Once Upon A Place A free exhibition of poetry and photography from students participating in Beyond Words, a Cheltenham Festivals outreach programme.
The Famous Five Story Trail Go on an adventure with The Famous Five and follow our Story Trail.
Make Your Own Scruffy Pet With author and illustrator Hannah Shaw.
6–15 October 2017 cheltenhamfestivals.com #cheltlitfest
Monday 9 – Friday 13 October
The place to grab a cuppa and continue those thought-provoking discussions, test your knowledge with The Times Crossword, enjoy locally sourced music and readings and explore a range of topics in our Very Short Introduction to... series.
GARDENS GALLERY
Make and decorate kazoos and shakers or colour in a paper puppet with author and Illustrator Tom Knight. Sunday 15 October, 1.30pm–3.30pm
THE HUDDLE
Guide To Free Activities
Head over to the Gardens Gallery for a display of Literature Festival inspired art.
Waterstones Children’s Festival Bookshop Join us in our Children’s Festival Bookshop to meet the visiting authors, have your books signed, browse the bookshelves and join in with story times and a host of other fun activities.
THE BOOKSTAND Visit our cosy outdoor lounge at the heart of the Festival Village: Swap some books, read the morning paper or enjoy pop-up performances.
THE TIMES & TLS THE WOODLAND TRUST WILD WOOD Saturday 7 & Sunday 8 / Saturday 14 & Sunday 15 October, 11am–5pm
Meet your favourite book characters like Maisy, The Gruffalo and Elmer, listen to storytellers’ fantastic tales, take part in a Teddy Bear’s Picnic, play Giant Jenga, make masks or take a virtual trip through the tree tops!
Where’s Wally? Trail ...around town
Pick up your FREE daily copy of The Times, The Sunday Times and special Festival edition of The Times Literary Supplement.
FREE EVENTS
Daily, 11am–3pm
Wow! Wally-Watchers! Follow our Where’s Wally? trail around town and seek out simply sensational scenes created by local schools. Pick up your trail sheet from any of the participating venues – see cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature for details. Where’s Wally? © 1987 – 2017 Martin Handford, published by Walker Books Ltd. “Where’s Wally?”™ © Classic Media Distribution Limited. All rights reserved.
Artwork Credits Main programme illustration by Michelle Thompson Family illustration by Jim Field
5pm ‘til late
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Lit Crawl returns! For one night only we take over the streets of Cheltenham for a fast-paced evening of pop-up events and quirky literary happenings. All un-ticketed and all completely FREE. Created in San Francisco in 2004, Lit Crawl blends a bar crawl with bookish content held in some surprising spots around town. Sample everything from flash fiction to zine-making, music to comedy, pop-up readings to furious spoken word.
Flash! 2
The Libertine Barbers
Take a seat in the barber’s chair as staff and students from the University of Gloucestershire deliver flashes of illumination on love and death and life in late modernity.
As proud sponsors of this year’s Lit Crawl, bottlegreen invites you to enjoy a range of sumptuous new experiences. As you travel through the trail, make sure to visit Formal House and finish at Hotel du Vin, where you’ll enjoy an array of signature bottlegreen cocktails bursting with exciting new flavours. We hope you enjoy your literary journey around the festival, be sure to keep an eye out for our messages in a bottle which have been skilfully stowed around Cheltenham to lead your taste buds on their own glorious journey…
• All events are free, unticketed and open to all. Bring a group or come alone. • Given the unconventional setting of some events, we regret that not all are wheelchair accessible but there will always be an alternative session that is • There is no age restriction on Lit Crawl but please note that some sessions may contain adult content • If a venue is full, staff will direct you to a different session on the Crawl • Lit Crawl Cheltenham is a project of The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival and the Litquake Foundation. San Francisco’s Litquake literary festival runs October 6-14 2017, with affiliated Lit Crawls in San Francisco, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Austin, Los Angeles, Iowa City, Seattle, London, Helsinki, Portland, Chicago, Denver and Cheltenham.
Other …around town and Lit Crawl supporters
Share your experience
@cheltfestivals #cheltlitfest
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Riffing off the Festival theme of ‘Who Do We Think We Are?’, Cheltenham Poetry Festival present a cabaret of spoken word exploring our illicit, secret selves. With urban poet JPDL, slam champ Chloe Jacquet, novelist Lania Knight, poet and DJ Dan Cooper, comedy rapper Robin Shaw Hood and comedian and poet Joy Amy Wigman.
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Who Do We Think We Aren’t?
9pm
In an apocalyptic near-future, London is flooded just as a new mother’s waters break. Author Megan Hunter reads from her haunting work of motherhood and survival in a very unique setting.
Feminism, Poetry And Gin
Scandinavian Coffee Pod
Are you feeling creative, angry or just obsessively interested in something? Join members of the Foreplay Cardiff zine collective and have a go at making your very own mini-zine.
Feminism, Poetry and Gin are here to hold those pesky romantics to account and give back some control to their nameless muses by way of gin and satire. 6.15–7.15pm
Flashers’ Club 8
Smokey Joes
Flashers’ Club is an open mic event featuring writers reading flash fiction. No submissions, no genre restrictions. Just bring your story (100-1000 words), sign up on the night and the mic is yours.
7.30–8.30pm
David Hepworth 9
Badlands
The beloved music journo drops by our favourite record store to tell tales from a career at the forefront of rock and asks whether the age of the rock star is over.
Jonny Fluffypunk 9
5–6pm
The acclaimed punk poet performs his new show How I Came To Be Where I Never Was – intended for anyone who has ever loved, owned a vinyl record or just been alive.
Food for Thought Global Footsteps
Black History Month Cheltenham host a showcase of music, food and excerpts from Spoken Word star Rider Shafique. Stop by and fuel up on words and delicious EastAfrican food (by donation) before your night on the Crawl.
From 5pm until late
It Must Have Been Dark By Then 4 Pick up headsets from
Boston Tea Party
It Must Have Been Dark By Then is a book and audio experience that uses a mixture of evocative music, narration and field recording to bring you stories of changing environments. There is no preset route; the software builds a unique map for each person’s experience. Just bring your phone and yourself. We’ll provide headphones and the book. You can download the app in advance on cheltenhamfestivals.com/lit-crawl
Badlands
6.15–7.15pm
One For The Road 6
“Sublime… well-crafted, tender and lifeaffirming.” Fringe Review
The Tavern
A new anthology from smith | doorstop books celebrating the British pub: glass-halffull and last orders poems, it’s-your-roundnext poems, poems so urgent they had to be scribbled on beer mats. Join Editor Helen Mort and contributing poets for a literary bar-hop!
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The Wilson
In a thoroughly unconventional course, The Wilson Arts Collective take all the poetry you (probably) hated at school and give it a thorough re-assessment. From classroom classics like Shakespeare and Keats to modern poetic heroes like Carol Ann Duffy and Ke$ha, join the Collective’s re-education programme. No uniform required.
8.15pm–9.45pm
Harry Potter Quiz 4
Boston Tea Party
Think you know your hinkypunks from your hippogriffs? Anna James invites you to prove that your Hogwarts letter just got lost in the post. There’s a chance to score some precious house points if you come donning your house colours or in fancy dress of your favourite characters.
Finale & After-Party
The Dandy Lions A feisty tribe of ‘aristocats’. As they roam and prowl, these flamboyant, narcissistic, flirtatious and utterly charming dandies will enchant you and have you roaring with laughter.
Typewriters at the ready! Give them a title and the poets will write you a poem while you wait.
PEEL PEEL, directed by Marksteen Adamson, explores what it means to establish a true identity within today’s selfie culture and carefully curated Facebook and Instagram lives.
9–10pm
Tessa Coates: Primates and Kate Lister: The C Bomb Tessa Coates has an absolutely useless degree in Anthropology and some very big questions about how we got here. Fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe she brings excerpts of her debut show which combines character and story-telling with very intense academic research. Which is surely what everyone wants from their comedy. ‘I love Tessa Coates’ (Caitlin Moran) When the British Board of Film Classification officially ranked swear words in order of offence; c**t came out on top. Whores of Yore founder Kate Lister talks you through the history of the C Bomb and how it came to occupy its current status as the most offensive word in the English language.
10pm until late
Kansas Smitty’s After-Party 12
Hotel du Vin
You’ve crawled your way around town and seen all manner of brainy, blissful and bizarre things. Time to join us at Hotel du Vin for our big finish.
6.15–7.15pm
Poetry 101
Keep your eyes peeled for…
Poet for Hire
6.15–7.15pm
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Key Lit Crawl Info:
Chloe Foy
Drop Ins from 6–8pm
This is literature done differently. Join us and get drunk on words. Lit Crawl supported by
7.30pm
‘Stunningly beautiful’ – The Mancunion
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Burning Eye Books Burning Eye are to Spoken Word what City Lights were to the Beat Generation: indispensable champions of a literary movement that is changing the world of poetry. Founding Editor Clive Birnie hosts three Burning Eye poets who call the west of England home: Sally Jenkinson, Rebecca Tantony and fellow editor Jenn Hart.
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Level 1
Taking inspiration from classical music as much as wider trends within British and American Indie pop, Chloe Foy writes a brand of melodic, home-grown pop that has been likened to Laura Marling and Sharon Van Etten.
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FREE
Formal House
Join us in the achingly cool Formal House for a hedonistic mix of music, comedy, spoken word, mouthwatering bottlegreen drinks and just a few surprises along the way…
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Formal House Takeover 11
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Saturday 7 October
Short, rolling performances from 7pm
She Plucked, She Ate 10
Chapel Arts
Enter the sensual world of Paradise Lost with Andrew Bate and experience the fall of Satan and the temptation in the garden through a spoken word and dance reimagining of John Milton’s epic masterpiece.
Fresh from winning the 2017 BBC Poetry Slam at the Edinburgh Fringe, Ben Norris brings a host of poets at the top of their game to bring the Crawl to its crescendo: Bridget Minamore, Anthony Anaxagorou and Cynthia Miller. For one night only, The Kansas Smitty’s House Band are leaving their East London bar to bring their inimitable brand of original swing music back to our fair town. Expect the late-night party atmosphere and cocktails that have become synonymous with their shows.