“Most book festivals ignore most people….”

I was excited to come across a new festival in an area I love (I won‘t give you its name). All the big names were there. No small names, or even medium names. And there was nobody from that area reading. It was a celeb fest. Local distinctiveness? It could have been anywhere with only the rural backdrop and the sponsors’ package changing. And it was £12 to attend each hour long event. Go to three events, eat, drink, travel. It adds up.

One criticism of book festivals is that – big names notwithstanding – they rarely include the books that lots of people read, for example on transport, on sport. Over at Lowdham we try to have a wide canvas. We do have celebs (but not the ones whose books you find in huge piles in chain bookshops) but within a balanced programme where there is something for everyone; events on transport; cricket, politics, fiction, poetry, travel and biography. And the last day is always free – with a big emphasis on East Midlands’ writers.

Lowdham will never be in the big league, but about 6,000 people came to the 54 events and the schools’ programme. Regional writers included Karen Maitland (Lincs) , Stephen Booth (Notts) , Dan Tunstall (Leicester), Matthew Beresford (Derbyshire). The new press Pewter Rose had an outing, with a good house for its two short story collections by Nottinghamshire writers. Not that we are parochial; one of our writers came by Eurostar and another flew in from Canada.

With this year being the tenth, we wanted to try that bit harder. The Festival ran for longer, and we had forays into Calverton, Nottingham and Caythorpe. Not as dramatic as the Festival trip to Dublin a few years back, but still. Best bits? For some, the rap guide to Darwin, for a participatory talk on pantomime, and for others still, Jackie Kay at her effervescent best. For me it was two autobiographical moments. The novelist Gillian Slovo telling us what Nelson Mandela said to her just after her father, Joe Slovo (Minister of Housing in the Mandela government) died. Mandela talked about how hard it was for the families of leaders like himself and Slovo who had devoted their lives to the cause, damaging their ability to be a good parent. The other was Nell Farrell’s description of being thirteen in Eastwood, bored, alienated ,and finding – among her mother’s crap records – Roberta Flack‘s “Just Like a Woman”. Our techie had the song well up, filling the hall, while we sat watching the author, knowing that had been a life changing moment for her. Time seemed to stand still.

It’s exhausting though. By mid-afternoon on the last day I was beginning to wilt. Tidying the cups, crumbs and plates off the café tables I wondered if Peter Florence at Hay does that. “I won the Booker Prize once you know,” I mumbled to a table of literary types, wiping the tables in front of them. “’Course you did, dear,” said one of the group, patting my arm sympathetically.

And then it was over. Apart from the last book launch that seemed to have developed a life of its own. Apart from stacking trestle tables, packing boxes, the marquees, the report to write, the thank you letters, the actual to compare to the estimate, the photos to send to the artists, the trip back to take down the forgotten Festival banners. The audience response forms. The debrief and the tentative plans for the year ahead. Two or three days after the Festival my colleague Jane Streeter and I realised that, pretty shortly, we’ll have to do it again.

Hardest point – the morning I was supposed to be booking my holiday but someone from the WI said we could not get into her hall to set up until the yoga finished, but everyone was somewhere else. Trivial, resolvable, but the holiday never got booked. No, I fib, the hardest point was deciding we were not happy with the original programme and we had to put the printing back a week, then another weekend, and in that weekend we secured five acts we wanted. We lost ten days publicity time but had a line up we wanted.

Taking the Festival home… Book festivals are nothing without books. Here’s what I picked up: The Owl Killers, medieval thriller by Karen Maitland; Chaplin’s Girl, biography by Miranda Seymour; Stephen Booth’s latest; Holding Stones, short stories by Roberta Dewa; Silas Marner by some bloke called George Eliot; biographies of Edward Carpenter and DH Lawrence.

Supported by Writing East Midlands

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop.