25 July 2020

We are thrilled to announce that the Festival has been chosen as a finalist in the prestigious Welcome to Yorkshire White Rose Awards in the Arts & Culture category. This is the third time we have been selected as a finalist in the past five years.

POSTPONED TO 2021: We’re sorry to announce that our events with Amanda Owen and Anne Choma have been postponed to 2021 – exact dates to be confirmed later this year. Please hold on to your tickets, which will remain valid, or you can request a refund – click below for more information:
GENTLEMAN JACK, AMANDA OWEN, HOLMFIRTH & AMANDA OWEN, MARSDEN

Authors who appeared at this year’s Festival, clockwise from left: Lemn Sissay, Bernardine Evaristo, Anne Choma, Sairish Hussain, Helen Mort, Amanda Owen, Tom Cutler.  While most of our live events were replaced with an online digital Festival, we were able to run a few pre-Festival events and also launched a special project: The Creative Mind.

Welcome to the award-winning Huddersfield Literature Festival

Join us for an annual celebration of books and authors, poetry and performance, with community, accessibility and inclusivity at its heart. Meet your favourite authors, discover new talent, hone your own skills or simply come along and enjoy the entertainment on offer. Many free or low-cost events, some with live subtitling by Stagetext, and AccessAble Access Guides to key venues.

Diversity and Representation at HLF

The Huddersfield Literature Festival (HLF) fully and unequivocally supports the Black Lives Matter movement. We also support calls by the newly created Black Writers’ Guild to address deep-seated inequalities in the publishing and wider book world, as reported in The Guardian in June.

Diversity, inclusivity, accessibility and representation are the bedrock of the Festival’s organisation and activities. At the same time we continually monitor our approach and strive to make improvements.

Our People & Partners – We strive to work with people and partnership organisations who are also committed to these principles and will not shy from difficult conversations that change often brings. HLF will continue to be guided by the diverse voices on our Steering Committee.

Diversity and Representation Plan – We are currently working to a three-year Diversity and Representation Plan, which we created in 2018 to run from 2019 to 2022. Although the Plan was our own initiative and not required to secure funding, we recognise its alignment with the Arts Council’s Creative Case for Diversity.

The Plan sets out where we are now and where we would like to be in terms of representation for Age-groups, BAME, Disability, Gender, LGBTQ+ and Social Class across the Festival’s Audiences, Performers, Volunteers, Venues and Management. It sets out SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-based) goals, examples of which include (but are not limited to):

• Closer monitoring of the our volunteers and committee members and initiatives to ensure representation across the board
• A comprehensive volunteer training programme
• New partnerships with organisations such as MACFest, Radio Sangam/Communities Together and Sharing Our Stories/One World, to deliver specific projects and events

The Plan is updated annually and will be replaced by a new long-term plan from 2023.