Plans for this year’s Chiswick Book Festival in September 2024 are well underway. It will be launched, in partnership with The Chiswick Cinema, with a monthly season of films written by Harold Pinter, who wrote The Caretaker while living in Chiswick. It will be curated by Pinter’s biographer, Michael Billington, who also lives in Chiswick.
Festival director Torin Douglas said: “Michael and I are delighted to be fulfilling a promise we made to Lady Antonia Fraser, who was married to the playwright for 28 years. At the 2020 Festival, as reported by The Observer, Lady Antonia said Harold’s screen work deserved great recognition and she held out hope that it might be celebrated in a season of films for the general public. We said we’d try to make it happen and we’re very grateful to Chris Parker, the marketing manager of The Chiswick Cinema, for his support.”
Harold Pinter is one of Chiswick’s two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and is featured on the Festival’s Writers Trail and Chiswick Timeline of Writers & Books.
The season will begin at 6pm on Saturday April 27th with a launch screening of the Joseph Losey-Harold Pinter thriller Accident, including a Q&A introduction with Michael Billington and a drinks reception afterwards. Tickets are now on sale on The Chiswick Cinema website, where you can also watch the trailer. Further films will be screened monthly on Sunday evenings. During the Chiswick Book Festival on Sunday September 15th, the film will be The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Each September, the Chiswick Book Festival brings together top authors and their readers for a week of talks on a range of fiction, non-fiction and children’s books. It is a non-profit-making community event, raising money for three reading charities and St Michael & All Angels Church, which organises the festival with support from local businesses, media and many volunteers. Sign up here for news updates.
The 16th Chiswick Book Festival will take place from September 11th to 18th 2024. See details and updates.