Friday 14 June
Lord Leycester Hospital
10.30pm

Join Rosie Goodwin as she talks about her latest novel, The Home Front Girls,  a gripping and emotional World War II drama about three remarkable women from different backgrounds who kept the country moving during its darkest hours, forging a friendship that will last forever.

Dotty, Lucy and Annabelle all turn up for work at Coventry’s largest department store, Owen Owen at the time war is declared. When Owen Owen is bombed during the Blitz, the girls are forced to embark in different paths.

Dotty has never known a life outside of the orphanage where she grew up. Lucy is the sole carer of her little sister; she’s head of the home now that her brother has gone to war.  Annabelle has led a life of privilege but everyone’s having to pinch the pennies at the moment.

Each of the girls discovers unexpected truths about their pasts and families which once revealed change their lives forever. With disaster at every turn, they’re going to need each other.

Includes morning coffee

Tickets: £6.00
Tickets available from Festival Box Office 01926 776438.

Friday 14 June
Warwick Library
11.00am and 2.00pm

Bring your parent or carer for a free fun-filled half-hour of action songs and more in Warwick Library.

We will be celebrating National Bookstart Week’s theme for 2013 of Fairytales, and we are expecting a special visit from the Bookstart Bear!

There are 2 sessions to choose from at either 11.00am or 2.00pm.

Although this is a free event you are advised to book and collect a ticket in advance from Warwick Library as there are a limited number of places. Tel: 0300 555 8171

FREE EVENT

Friday 14 June
Lord Leycester Hospital
2.00pm

Join critically acclaimed writer, Jeremy Page as he talks about his first historical novel, The Collector of Lost Things, in which the characters are fuelled by obsession, passion and ghosts. The Collector of Lost Things is an extraordinarily compulsive read.

The worlds of ocean and ice were meeting in a frontier of rage, as if the Earth had torn in two along this line. This was a place, if there ever was a place, where you could disappear.

Jeremy Page grew up in North Norfolk and has worked as a script editor for Film4 and the BBC, in addition to being a scriptwriter and teaching on the Creative Writing MA at UEA. He has published two previous novels, Salt and The Wake.

Stunningly good – Rose Tremain

Includes tea and cake

Tickets: £10.00
Tickets available from Festival Box Office 01926 776438.

Friday 14 June
Lord Leycester Hospital
7.30pm

One of our most accomplished biographers, Jane Dunn uncovers the lives of the successful, beautiful and rebellious Du Maurier sisters. Much is known about the middle sister, Daphne, author of the famous novels, Rebecca, Jamaica Inn and My Cousin Rachel. But Daphne had two very talented sisters, Angela and Jeanne, a writer and a skilled artist in their own right. All three were bound together in a family drama that inspired their art.

The sisters were brought up in a theatrical family with a peculiar and powerful father. Dunn reveals the unconventional lifestyle and creative energy of Piffy, Bird and Bing, as they were known, and uncovers lives as psychologically complex as a Daphne du Maurier plotline.

Dunn has been described by The Sunday Times as ‘one of our best biographers’. Her work includes biographies of sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and the bestselling Elizabeth and Mary, which looks at the lives of Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots.

Tickets: £10.00
Tickets available from Festival Box Office 01926 776438.

Saturday 15 June
Lord Leycester Hospital
10.30pm

Kathleen Hilditch published her autobiography, Full Circle, at the age of ninety three.

... a wonderful journey through the ups and downs of an actor’s life.
Dame Judi Dench

She has now completed a novel, The Boat Wife, which tells of life on an old Air Sea Rescue launch after World War II.

Kathleen began her long stage career as a scholarship student at The Old Vic. She toured throughout the war with stars such as Dame Sybil Thorndyke, Sir Lewis Casson and Sir John Mills. She then departed for New Zealand where she founded a Creative Drama Centre.

On returning to England she developed her career as a writer, supporting and attending creative writing workshops locally.

Join Kathleen for morning coffee and chat with Warwick Words Story Collector, Campbell Perry.

Includes morning coffee

Tickets: £6.00
Tickets available from Festival Box Office 01926 776438.

Saturday 15 June
Lord Leycester Hospital
2.00pm

The Battle of Bosworth has a legendary significance in British history. The last occasion that an English king would die on the battlefield, it was also the battle that brought an end to the dynasty of Plantagenet kings who had ruled since 1154, and heralded the birth of the Tudor dynasty.

Yet the story of Bosworth is more than just the result of a few hours bloodshed on the battlefield. It is the culmination of the rise of the House of Tudor, a remarkable story which began fifty years earlier, when a page of Henry V’s ran off with his widow. It is the tale of the turbulent life of Henry Tudor, who, against the odds, rose from relatively humble origins and exile in France to overthrow the deeply unpopular Richard III.

Drawing on a wide range of unpublished sources as well as new research that has only recently come to light, Chris Skidmore will disentangle fact from legend and relate the compelling story of the battle in full.

Event supported by:

Includes tea and cake

Tickets: £9.50
Tickets available from Festival Box Office 01926 776438.

Saturday 15 June
Friends Meeting House
4.00pm

James Bond is an institution. He is well known and beloved around the world. In 2012, the year of his fiftieth anniversary, he even escorted the Queen to the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Join intelligence scholar Christopher Moran, author of Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain, as he seeks to understand Bond’s enduring popularity. From the cars to the cocktails, from the gadgets to the girls, Moran will explore every aspect of Britain’s most dashing and daring secret agent. Moving between fact and fiction, he will reveal remarkable similarities between Bond and the work of real intelligence services. Particular attention will be given to the life of 007’s creator, Commander Ian Fleming, who served in Naval Intelligence during World War II.

For fans of the franchise, as well as followers of secret history, this talk is not to be missed!

Tea Time Talk
In Association with

Tickets: £5.00
Tickets available from Festival Box Office 01926 776438.

Saturday 15 June
Lord Leycester Hospital
7.30pm

The Other Mitford by Cotswold-based journalist Diana Alexander is the story of Pamela, the only one of the eccentric, high-profile family who never hit the headlines and never espoused a cause but was content to live a quieter life, becoming the rock on which her more volatile sisters were to depend.

For a decade in the 1970s and 80s Diana was Pamela’s cleaning lady and also became her friend. As a writer, she realised that this was a tale which had to be told but could never find time to tell it until now. The result is a very personal account of the ‘quiet sister’ who was at least as interesting as her noisier siblings.

Tickets: £10.00
Tickets available from Festival Box Office 01926 776438.

Sunday 16 June
Lord Leycester Hospital
2.00pm

Penguin Books were launched in 1935 by Allen Lane. Over the next four decades, they became a force for good comparable with the BBC and the OU, bringing high quality writing, fiction and non-fiction, to a wide audience. Lane built a brand which remains today the best-known brand in world publishing.

Join James Mackay, one of the Trustees of the Penguin Collectors Society, who will talk about and show some of what lay behind Penguin, and behind that row of orange, green, and multi-coloured spines visible on every civilised bookshelf.

Includes tea and cake

Tickets: £9.50
Tickets available from Festival Box Office 01926 776438.