One of the UK’s largest literary festivals, running throughout October, has just begun in Sheffield.
I spoke with Lesley Webster about how she curated this year’s smashing line-up and grew Off The Shelf from the beginning into an annual celebration beloved by publishers and locals alike.
Could you introduce what Off The Shelf Festival is all about and what your role is involved in it?
Off The Shelf: Festival of Words is actually in its 35th edition. So it’s been going for a long time. And I’m one of the curators, so shape that programme and choose the events, and I’ve been with it for the 35 years so I’m full of enthusiasm for this festival, which has never left me really. Knowing the audience is key and after so many years of working on it, we’ve got a really good idea of what people want.
How did you make the lineup specifically for this year?
We always keep really up to date with trends in reading and what’s popular by looking at the Guardian newspaper, for instance, that releases lists of books to look out for every New Year.
Importantly, we’re one of the few festivals in the UK that will go and visit publishers. Every March, we go down to London, and have two intensive days of going to Penguin and Profile, Faber, Bloomsbury and Simon & Schuster… we do the whole lot. They tell us what’s coming out in autumn which is fantastic because that’s when we can really start to shape it.
We are choosing from 100s and 100s of things but we can only take a fraction of what we’re offered.
Our aim is to have a very, very varied festival. So there’ll always be history, politics, green issues, fiction, poetry, and we choose, over that eclectic mix, the people we know our audiences will want to hear.
For any students who might be intrigued by the festival, but just don’t know where to start with the massive lineup, are there any events you would recommend or advice to help them decide?
Students, like all audiences, have their particular loves, don’t they? So for history students I would say to filter our website and put in history because we have some amazing speakers coming: Paul Mason with A Global History of Communism, Jeff Andrews talking about the history of radicalism, and a talk on Holbein.
And for students who just love reading, I’d really recommend our fiction afternoon, which is on our opening weekend (Saturday 10 October) at the Creative Lounge.
The first panel particularly is called First Fiction, where we have our young authors with their debut books. One’s coming from New York, called Natalie Adler. Imani Thompson has got a huge following on social media, and that book’s called Honey. And the other book is called Hard Place by Gab Torr, and Gab is based in Sheffield.
Now, an event like that where you’re getting 3 different young authors with contemporary fiction. It’s a great way to hear from them – and these people may be huge in the future. We had Hilary Mantel when she was not that well known. So I definitely recommend that.
After the global success of Butcher, Japanese fiction in translation is riding high, so we have 2 Japanese authors in the festival this year.
And, we have an event with Lee Child, for instance, who is an alumni of the University of Sheffield. That one was absolutely sold out, so that’s wonderful.
Students could definitely find something that they were interested in there.
Wow, that’s a really nice variety. I was wondering, how are the events geared towards people who maybe haven’t read the books, can you still go along and enjoy yourself?
Oh, absolutely. You do not have to have read the book. You don’t even have to read the book after – but I hope when you’ve heard somebody speaking, you think, ‘I’ll go buy that now and I’ll get that signed’ because you’re encouraged to read more.
But you can just go there to listen and learn.
We’ve had people ask if the author reads the whole book at the event, so I think it’s exciting not knowing what an event might be. And they might read one or two little passages from a book. But they’ll mainly talk about it. A lot of our events are illustrated talks that are just a great way to spend an hour.
So do all the events follow different formats?
Lots of different formats. The event I talked about with the three authors will be an interview and conversation. And it’ll be very much thrown open to the floor as well for people to ask questions so there’s always that opportunity.
Illustrated talks are where somebody will just talk to you and show pictures, and they’re very, very popular. So with the whole Holbein event – those fantastic paintings will be on a big screen with an art historian talking about them.
Art History’s Funniest Bits is going to be more like stand-up. We’ve got Luke Wright, who’s one of the UK’s top performing poets.
One of our events actually is going to be recorded as it happens as a live podcast. That’s ‘Lessons to Learn from Cities of the Future’ with Gabriella Bennett, and that’s been curated by Professor Beth Perry from the University of Sheffield.
All events are generally an hour long, and then a book signing.
Amazing. You’ve been with it since the start. So, can you tell me about what Off The Shelf was like when it began, and how you grew it over the years to be what it is today?
When the festival started, 35 years ago, I was an Events Community Arts Officer with Sheffield City Council. We have two others at the core of the festival, Sarah and Maria, who were here from the start – me and Sarah argue over who thought of the name ‘Off The Shelf’.
Sheffield Libraries were really keen to have a literature festival because lots of cities have them and Sheffield didn’t. We had a lot of event experience, not so much literary experience, but we just got going.
In the first year we had 40 events, so it was quite small, but even then we featured some well-known authors because that’s how the profile rises. You know, we used to do things like send Valentine’s cards to writers saying ‘from a city full of book lovers’, trying to lure them to Sheffield. You try all sorts of things to just get people’s attention. After about 10 years the publishers clocked that we were getting good audiences, and started offering people to us.
Eight years ago we were going to be cut by Sheffield City Council, and we’re rescued by the University of Sheffield led by Professor Vanessa Toulman. And we’ve been here ever since.
Now we’ve built a really core loyal audience and the festival gets a whole host of really fantastic speakers every October. But as I say, we really try to get new people all the time.
And we’d love, love to have more students coming along.
Is there anything else you want to say about what the audiences can get out of going along?
If people have a little look on the website, we’ve got a film from a previous festival and the reason we put that up there is because we want people to actually see what events look like, and people laughing and having a good time and that it’s quite relaxed.
It is entertaining, but you do learn things, and you can meet some of your favourite authors.
We encourage students to have a look. We always do a concession on tickets that students can get. And we have a mailing list where we send out newsletters and do competitions which are always for some tickets. So it’s worth signing up to our newsletter from the website.
Off The Shelf runs until 25th October.
Image Credit: Off The Shelf Festival of Words
