Chiswick Book Festival and Writers Trail map
Jun 5, 2023
Five years after the launch of Chiswick’s Writers Trail, celebrating authors who lived in Chiswick, 15 more novelists, dramatists and poets appear in a new enlarged edition, to mark this year’s 15th Chiswick Book Festival.
New names unveiled this week at a launch event at The Chiswick Cinema include Carla Lane, creator of three of TV’s most popular comedies, The Liver Birds, Butterflies and Bread; Lynn Redgrave, who wrote Shakespeare for My Father and other plays about her famous family; Samuel Richardson, called ‘one of the fathers of the English novel’ for Pamela and Clarissa; Geoffrey Household, author of Rogue Male; and Edgar Wallace, creator of King Kong and one of the most prolific and filmed writers of the 20th Century.
They join poets Dylan Thomas and James Berry and humorists Michael Flanders and Stephen Potter, who were announced a year ago in May 2022; and six more poets added in September 2022, including William Morris and the two earliest names, Lady Mary Sidney and John Donne, Prebendary of Chiswick, both born in the 16th Century.
CHISWICK TIMELINE MURAL
Chiswick writers on the original 2018 Trail include WB Yeats, Harold Pinter, Dame Iris Murdoch, John Osborne, WM Thackeray, Alexander Pope, EM Forster, JG Ballard, Anthony Burgess, Nancy Mitford and Robert Bolt.
The launch was attended by many of those who helped compile the list or live in houses and roads featured on the trail as well as theatre and film directors, local councillors and the designers of the Writers Trail maps. Karen Liebreich of Abundance London created the Chiswick Timeline mural, which inspired the Writers Trail.
The Writers Trail forms part of the Chiswick Timeline of Writers & Books, an online archive of more than 400 writers who have lived in Chiswick - or are linked with the area - and written a book.
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