To all of you who came to Burford Lit Fest 2024 - we salute you!
Thank you for your support, patience and enthusiasm. I am sure you will agree we had a glorious line-up of events over three days. I hope, like me, you feel your eyes were opened to so many different aspects of our world from the people of Afghanistan, the bicycle chasing dogs of America, the world of a cosmology theorist and the simple beauty of late light.
I would like to give special thanks to .....
The team at Princeton University Press for their constant support
Every one of our wonderful guest authors
Lorna, my right hand and often my left at the same time
Matthew Freud for giving us venues at Bull Burford and The Lenthall Chapel
Andrew, Holly, Jonny and Immy for being the calm to my storm
Burford Literary Festival was born out of a desire to create conversations and broaden our horizons beyond the obvious mass market shelves of the book selling giants. We aim to give a public voice to authors who may not always have the mega-microphone of big budget campaigns which reflects and magnifies how we stock our shelves at The Madhatter Bookshop.
Independent bookshops offer shelves packed with hand-curated books, they are a window to books that you never knew you wanted to read. In this world of instantaneous satisfaction bookshops offer a return to the joy of browsing, of slowly running your fingers across the spines until they rest on words that appeal. In short, we cannot loose the war on words to allow books to become a click and collect commodity because we will loose the joy of walking into a bookshop as the scent of freshly made coffee mingles with the scent of paper and ink and time is allowed to stand still and stretch and bend as your eyes fall on a book.
We look forward to seeing you at BLF 2025..... if not before at Madhatter bookshop.
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