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Thank you for your support

Now that we have managed to breathe after the Festival whirlwind, we want to thank everyone who has supported us.

Very special thanks are due to the following – we really couldn’t do any of it without you:

all our Festival partners (and their wonderful staff) for the use of their excellent venues, their advice, technical support and marketing input
our generous and supportive sponsors and funders, in particular Arts Council England and the University of Derby
our army of dedicated Festival and Retail Volunteers who made every event run so smoothly.

Ticket and book sales are up!

We are doing the final number crunching for ticket and book sales, but it does look like our ticket sales are double last year’s at around 3000 tickets over the same number of events (50). Book sales have also surpassed our targets with around £16,000 of sales.

Of course, it’s not all about the money, although, as a charity, it helps keep us afloat! We have received lots of great comments and feedback and people seem to feel that it was a particularly strong and varied programme this year. One comment, overhead on the stairs at QUAD and reported to us by a Trustee: “I don’t think I have ever been to a Derby Book Festival event when I haven’t had my mind opened up, just like today!”

Event Recordings still available

If there are events you may have missed, you can still catch up with recordings of 8 of this year’s events:

Charles Dowding: No Dig Gardening
Lev Parikian: Taking Flight
Brian Bilston: Days Like These
T M Logan: The Mother
Patrick Gale & Joanna Cannon
Debut Author: Tom Crewe: The New Life
Mike Bannister: Concorde
Tim Marshall: The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space will Change our World

These are available as individual recorded events or you can watch all 8 with our Digital Pass. The recordings are available for a period of six weeks from Tuesday 30 May to Tuesday 11 July.

We feel sure you will have your own favourites but the Team’s favourites are Alastair Campbell, Laura Bates and Brian Bilston.

We would love to know which were your favourites! Please post on Facebook and Twitter, as well as letting us have any ideas for the Autumn Edition and for next year’s Festival.

Meet the Author events for schools

The Festival is far from over as this week we have two Meet the Author events for primary schools at Derby Theatre, which will be live streamed to schools. These annual events, sponsored by local educational supplier Cosy, have welcomed some of the biggest names in children’s literature including former Children’s Laureates, Sir Michael Morpurgo and Lauren Child.

This year, the current Waterstones Children’s Laureate, poet and author Joseph Coelho will be joining us for an event for Years 3 and 4 and award-winning author (and former Derby school teacher) Lesley Parr will join us for an event for Years 5 & 6. Nearly all Derby schools will be sending a group of children and teachers to the events and we will have nearly 1000 children at Derby Theatre and around 11,000 joining us online in their classrooms.

Kate Mosse event, Friday 14 July, 7 – 8pm

We have one more event for you before the summer! Join international, No 1 best-selling novelist Kate Mosse at QUAD at a special event, sponsored by Smith Partnership, to celebrate publication of her new novel, The Ghost Ship. A sweeping and epic love story taking us from France in 1610 to Amsterdam and the Canary Islands in the 1620s, The Ghost Ship is a thrilling novel of adventure and buccaneering, love and revenge, stolen fortunes and hidden secrets on the High Seas. Most of all, it is a tale of defiant women in a man’s world. Tickets are on sale online or from QUAD.

Cancelled events

Sadly, having started the Festival with confidence about no cancellations, we did have to cancel two events at this year’s Festival due to Covid yet again! Both authors are recovering well but we were sad that neither Jo Cheetham nor John Boyne could join us. We hope to invite them back to future Festivals.

Please let us have your feedback

It’s not too late to give us your feedback on this year’s events. This helps us to make future Festivals even better. Please complete our feedback form online by Saturday 8 July. Everyone who completes it online and has given us their email address has a chance to win a £25 book token.

We look forward to seeing you in the Autumn: 17 – 19 November

Our mailing address is:

Derby Book Festival

Darley Abbey

Derby, DE22 1DF

United Kingdom

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Derby Book Festival e-shot | Thank you for your support