Maggie O’Farrell
Stroud Book Festival is thrilled and proud to present an in-conversation event with renowned novelist and screenwriter, Maggie O’Farrell. Maggie joins us to discuss her tenth novel, “Land”, her most ambitious to date. Inspired by her own Irish family history and the landscape of the Wild Atlantic Way, it is a spellbinding, multi-generational epic which…
Read MoreRewild Your Reading
Stuck in a reading rut? Keen to broaden your reading horizons? Then in this National Year of Reading, our 2026 Stroud Book Festival opening night event is one for you. We welcome three expert readers, all of whom are have thought and written about what it means to read deeply and widely. We guarantee you…
Read MoreBringing Up the Bodies
Kate Riordan and Sam Steele (aka Sarah Steele) are two of Stroud’s most popular and successful novelists. Their latest books feature more than one body, and a crime that urgently demands to be solved. Set in the Stroud valleys, Kate’s The Last Time I Saw Her Alive is a slow-burning, suspenseful time-shift novel in which…
Read MoreDoom Painting
It’s a novel, more than anything, about how we imagine vastly better worlds than the ones we’re living in So said prize-winning novelist and poet A K Blakemore when interviewed by The Bookseller about her dazzlingly inventive new novel, Doom Painting, a visceral, teeming epic which plunges us into the bloody action of the Peasants’…
Read MoreScare Stories
The Horror and Ghost Stories genre is one of the fastest growing categories in the fiction market. But why exactly do we love fright-filled books so much? To explore why we thrill to horror stories and tales full of psychic suspense, we welcome two authors who have crafted compelling books designed to have an unsettling…
Read MoreSaturday Salon
The Stroud Book Festival Saturday Salon returns! Back for its third year, this relaxed gathering is staged to celebrate and support up-and-coming local writing talent. Join us at The Stroud Hotel for an afternoon of readings, talks and conversations from an eclectic selection of emerging Gloucestershire writers, who have been invited to share extracts from…
Read MoreThe Midnight Train
When your life flashes before your eyes, where would you stop? No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there. Give you the chance to re-live the moments that meant most. To see what kind of person you really were. For Wilbur, his best days were with Maggie, the love…
Read MoreFor the Love of Stroud
What’s so great about Stroud? And what makes it such an inspiring and creatively stimulating place in which to live? We invite two Gloucestershire legends to discuss! Celebrated novelist Katie Fforde has lived in Stroud since the early 1980s and many of her bestselling books have been inspired by Stroud people and Stroud places. Her…
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