A record-breaking year at Wimbledon BookFest!
We celebrated our most successful year ever as record numbers enjoyed more than 100 events in 10 days, with headliners including Rupert Everett, Jung Chang, Elif Shafak, Dame Harriet Walter, Adam Buxton, Irvine Welsh, David Nicholls, Lemn Sissay, Ed Davey MP, Lyse Doucet, Philippe Sands, Raymond Antrobus, Shirley Ballas and Lady Hale.
London’s leading arts and culture festival saw significant audience growth with 20,000 tickets sold, 6,000 more than in 2024, and an increase of forty percent, making this year’s event the biggest in our eighteen-year history. A massive 273% uplift in under 30s attending the Festival reflects an appetite for real life events and connections in an increasingly digitalised world, while a new food and drink strand featuring Thomasina Miers, Sam Holland and Olly Smith attracted many first-time festival goers.
A focus on global collaborations saw Wimbledon BookFest develop audience reach and community engagement significantly, with a series of hot-ticket events at accessible venue Merton Arts Space, Wimbledon Library. A partnership with the prestigious Lahore Literary Festival, now in its third year, showcased South Asian creatives, with speakers including broadcaster Reeta Chakrabarti, Women’s Prize shortlisted authors Nussaibah Younis and trailblazing artist, writer and activist Salima Hashmi. Partnering with the Seoul WOW Book Festival and the Korean Cultural Centre for the first time to forge links with the local Korean community of New Malden and celebrate Korean storytelling, BookFest welcomed novelists Juhea Kim, Ela Lee and Park Seolyeon and hosted the UK premiere of the pansori adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap In Time.
The Festival’s celebrated schools programme, run in partnership with lead sponsor, the University of Roehampton, saw children and young people from over seventy schools across South London attend events with authors including Stephen Mulhern, MC Grammar, Nadia Shireen, Jamila Gavin, Liz Pichon and Christopher Edge, whilst pupils from 72 schools across London and Surrey entered the annual Young Writers Competition – the most ever to take part.
Fiona Razvi, Festival Founder and Director said: “Wimbledon BookFest has truly come of age at eighteen, as we celebrate our biggest and most vibrant festival ever! The record numbers flocking to the Festival this year reflect our audience’s appetite for live events and nuanced discussion in an increasingly digital and fractured world. It was a real highlight to collaborate with our global partners to create a boundary-pushing programme for our Library venue to connects communities, celebrate the power of storytelling and introduce vital new voices. We are delighted to have seen a real shift in the demographic of our audience and to have welcome many first-time festival goers of all ages from our local community this year.”
Next year’s Festival dates are 15-25 October 2026.
