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With its haut-boho vibe, the Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall has become one of Britain’s most colourful artistic gatherings. Run by the Earl and Countess of St Germans, with a medieval priory and a Humphrey Repton park as its backdrop, it finds room for wild swimming, cookery demos, a fashion zone and a flower show alongside cultish bands such as British Sea Power.

New this year is an outdoor cinema with Martin Scorsese choosing a double bill each night at dusk, plus a Poetry Takeaway offering “free, made-to-order” poems. The authors appearing include Edmund de Waal, A.C. Grayling, Gillian Slovo and the writers of “Peep Show”, while Martin Parr holds an instant photography exhibition. “We wanted to create a place where anything goes,” says Catherine St Germans, once a columnist on this magazine. “We can’t offer artists a lot of money, but we can offer carte blanche—which is a rare thing in this day and age. We were told that to succeed a festival must be either literary or musical, but that’s proved to be wrong.” 

Port Eliot Festival  July 21st to 24th 

~ ANTHONY GARDNER

Summer means festivals, and Britain does them very well. Glastonbury (Somerset, June 24th to 26th) is still the big one, and it is taking a break next year, so all the more reason to follow it on the BBC. It has hefty headliners—U2, Coldplay and Beyoncé (right), plus the headline-worthy Elbow—supported by the usual cornucopia. This may be the first bill to embrace Paul Simon and Big Boi, Robyn Hitchcock and Robyn the Swedish Madonna, plus Jimmy Cliff and Rastamouse.

Latitude (Suffolk, July 15th to 17th) has less wattage—headliners are the brooding The National, the likeable Paolo Nutini and the flimsy Suede—but its lower ranks are teeming with talent. Look out for theatrical pop from Anna Calvi, warm soul from The Duke & The King, and many distinguished authors, all struggling to find the right outfit.  read more »

There has been some grumbling lately about the Oxford Literary Festival. Some authors complain that, with more than 200 events spread over three colleges—Christ Church, Merton and Corpus Christi—it has become too big and lacking in co-ordination. Certainly, a schedule that has Colin Thubron, Alex Bellos and David Constantine giving rival talks at the same time looks profligate with its speakers.

Perhaps that’s why there are fewer big names this year, and the relaunched children’s festival threatens to outshine the main programme, with Eoin Colfer, Francesca Simon and a gathering of four Children’s Laureates (Jacqueline Wilson, Anne Fine, Michael Rosen and Anthony Browne) at the Sheldonian Theatre. Still, what book-lover could resist P.D. James and Jill Paton Walsh discussing Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, or Edna O’Brien reading in Christ Church Library? And no festival that has Madhur Jaffrey presiding over a banquet in a medieval dining hall can be entirely lacking in spice.

~ ANTHONY GARDNER

Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival  April 2nd to 10th

Picture Credit: PhillipC

At England's annual Big Chill Festival, an outdoor music event in a charming wooded park in Herefordshire, the London band Chrome Hoof blitzed the audience with a 40-minute arsenal of their trademark metal disco. The ten-piece ensemble's sound is unmistakably jittery and spacey, combining 1970s funk with electronica and metal. Their look sets them apart as well: quite unlike their bearded, skinny-jean clad peers, Chrome Hoof prefers silvery sequinned monk's robes. Dancing a frenzy near the stage during much of their set was a little girl wearing butterfly wings and a T-shirt that read "If I'm lost call my Mommy at this number".

"The majority of music is easy to follow, but we give people something to think about," says Milo Smee, who created the band ten years ago with his brother Leo Smee, originally as a bass-drum duo. "We have no rulebook. And I don't really care what people think about it." 

Chrome Hoof mixes a heavy dose of 1970s Parliament funk with some Motorhead, Iron Maiden and a few prog-metal jolts (a la the Mars Volta). The band's theatrics seem inspired by Arthur Brown, a flamboyant English rock musician, while their songs are structured to resemble those of Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Goblin, a rather obscure 1970s Italian rock band.  read more »

Not content with hosting the world’s largest literary gathering at Edinburgh in August, Scotland now accommodates 37 other book festivals, soon to be linked by a Book Nation initiative to share authors.

One of the fastest-growing and most ambitious is the Borders Book Festival: having started in 2004 with four writers and an audience of 300, it now attracts 8,000 visitors to the walled garden of Harmony House in Melrose. This year it has a strong political theme, with Robert Harris, James Naughtie, Shirley Williams, Fergal Keane and Douglas Hurd among the speakers: “the idea”, says the director, Alistair Moffat, “was to get some cool heads together once the dust from the general election had settled.” The comedians Rory Bremner and Victoria Wood will be there to take a less reverential view.

The new £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction is to be launched with appearances by six of the shortlistees, including Hilary Mantel and Adam Foulds, while Michael Morpurgo, a former teacher and a tireless performer, is the main draw for children. Moffat attributes the event’s success to the boom in Scottish writing, from Iain M. Banks to J.K. Rowling, and a national love of “congregation: getting together and arguing”.

Borders Book Festival  Melrose, June 17th-20th 

~ ANTHONY GARDNER

Picture Credit: joeandkaty (via Flickr)

In the great muddy field of British summer festivals, the Manchester International Festival stands out like a dry tent. The reason is simple: every event is an event, presenting either new work or bold new pairings. For his second biennial line-up, the director, Alex Poots, has got Zaha Hadid designing a typically voluptuous “chamber-music hall” (pictured) for pieces by Bach, the camp crooner Rufus Wainwright writing his first opera, Kraftwerk playing the Velodrome in tandem with Steve Reich, the audacious documentarist Adam Curtis making immersive theatre with Punchdrunk and Damon Albarn, and the rock band of the moment, Elbow, playing with the Hallé Orchestra—“the original Manchester band”, as Guy Garvey calls them. All this and Carlos Acosta too.

Manchester International Festival, July 2nd-19th 

~ TIM DE LISLE

FOR a writer at a literary festival there is only one thing more terrifying than an empty room: a full one. The rows of intelligent, expectant faces trigger a frisson of fear and joy. Fear, because what if we make a fool of ourselves? And joy, because somebody loves us enough to come and listen.  read more »