Top line-up unveiled as Fishbourne Literary Festival returns - find out who's coming

Speaking at the festival on March 25 will be Claire Fuller, Phil Hewitt, Deborah Moggach and William Shaw in a full day’s programme from 10-4pm. The day will include book signing, sales and a second-hand book fair, plus gifts and a promises tree and a prize draw. Lunch will be available in the church hall. Tea, coffee and cake will also be available throughout the day.

Tickets are £25 for the day, available on fishbourneliteraryfestival.co.uk. The money raised from the event will go to St Peter & St Mary Church and the chosen charity for 2023, the Snowdrop Trust. The timings for the speakers will be Phil Hewitt – 10-10.45; Claire Fuller – 11.15-12; William Shaw – 12.30-1.15; Deborah Moggach – 2-2.45; and TBA – 3.15-4pm.

Chairman Simon Cox is delighted to be back: “This should have happened in 2020 which would been our fifth festival and we had actually expanded it to a two-day event for the first time. We had ten authors all lined up coming from all sorts of places and all the tickets had been selling well but all the news was creeping up on us. We had to make a decision because the festival was at the end of March and so we decided that we had to pull the plug on it because of safety concerns and then the lockdown happened anyway. We did consider 2021 a little but ultimately we thought that it was a lot of time and effort when we weren't sure whether people would just be too nervous to attend and so we just decided to have an extra year. But the fact is that the church needs the funds and we are very pleased to be back.

“Last time I was shadowing the chairman of the literary festival who had run it for the first four years with a view to taking over the following year. After the lockdowns, I suppose I was a little worried that given that the committee was mostly elderly people then things might not come back but actually it has been very warming just how people have stepped up again and we have got some new people on the committee as well.”

Deborah Moggach has written 20 novels and two books of short stories. She adapted several of these novels for TV, including Seesaw, Stolen and Final Demand. Other writers’ books she has adapted include Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, Anne Fine’s Goggle-Eyes and the BAFTA nominated movie of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley.

Claire Fuller is the author of five novels: her latest, The Memory of Animals, will be published on April 23 in the UK and June 23 in the US and Canada. Her previous, Unsettled Ground, won the Costa Novel Award 2021, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Phil Hewitt is group arts editor for Sussex Group Newspapers. His books include Chichester Remembered, Chichester: Then and Now, Gosport: Then and Now, Keep on Running and In The Running. His latest book Outrunning The Demons explores the way running can offer healing after trauma. Phil wrote it after being stabbed and beaten in a vicious Cape Town street attack.

William Shaw, crime writer and journalist, offers as his latest book The Trawlerman, the fourth in his series set in Dungness and featuring DI Alex Cupidi, who originally appeared as one of the characters in his 2016 novel The Birdwatcher. Writing as G. W. Shaw, Dead Rich is his first adventure thriller.