Complimentary tickets for UOE students

Join us as we launch this year’s Essex Book Festival with booker prize -winner, Ben Okri.

Part vision, part mystery, this story of a midsummer night’s madness, in multi-award-winning poet, playwright and novelist Ben Okri’s inimitable style, is as alive with echoes and reverberations as the enchanted forest itself. Think Ingmar Bergman meets William Shakespeare, with a dash of Mozart.

This event will be chaired by Dr Jak Peake from University of Essex.

We are thrilled to be joined by Britain’s first ever Black female MP, Diane Abbott, who will be telling her astonishing story of groundbreaking achievement and the political and social challenges she has faced in Parliament.

Ever since the day she first walked through the House of Commons as the only state-educated Black woman MP, she has been a fearless and vocal champion for the causes that have made Britain what it is today. Get ready for a discussion full of Diane’s trademark frankness and humour.

This event will be chaired by Professor John Bartle from University of Essex.

In The Bullet, Tom Lee attempts to understand what happened to his parents – both were patients at Severalls Psychiatric Hospital in Colchester at different times in their lives – and what happened to him. It is a powerful and deeply personal exploration of mental health, and an indelible account of the legacy of familial illness and living with a fracturing mind.

Tom Lee will be in conversation with author and radio/podcast producer, Chris Penhall.

A sequel to Dante’s Inferno, which set Dante at the University of Essex, Dante’s Purgatorio relocates to Mersea Island, where a mountain is constructed out of Flexible Rock Substitute (FRS).

‘This new reworking of Dante’s masterpiece is remarkable: for boldness, resourceful inventiveness, and…for its emotional and moral heft.’ – Ralph Pite

Award-winnning poet and playwright, Clare Pollard, will discuss her brilliant and bawdy, romantic and provocative, dazzling novel, The Modern Fairies which is inspired by real events, about the delights and dangers of storytelling in dark times.

Clare Pollard will be in conversation with Holly Pester.

English historian, mythographer, and author of Inventory of A Life Mislaid, Marina Warner will discuss her latest book about sanctuary: what it means for people in desperate situations today, and what refuge and displacement has meant for people throughout history, and the canons of literature and myth.