Wendy Joseph KC, Ben Macintyre and two of the three Chiswick walks are sold out. The festival runs 9 to 14 September, with tickets from £4 to £17.50.
Four sessions at next month’s Chiswick Book Festival have already sold out, two weeks before it opens. If you were planning to book on the day, check the list first.
The festival’s own programme updates page records these as full, with waiting lists:
- Festival Walk 1 and 1a: The Beatles in Chiswick
- Festival Walk 2: Riverside Writers of Chiswick
- Rough Justice: Wendy Joseph KC
- Ben Macintyre: The Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy
The Macintyre event is Saturday 12 September at 6.30pm at St Michael and All Angels, and its box office page now offers only a waiting list. Two of the festival’s three guided walks have gone. The third, Alan Fortune’s two-hour walk from Chiswick Park to Bedford Park past writers’ homes on Sunday 13 September at 10.45am, still has tickets.
The 18th Chiswick Book Festival runs from Wednesday 9 to Monday 14 September.
How the week is shaped
The festival opens on Wednesday 9 September in the Boston Room at the George IV on Chiswick High Road, with the Local Authors Showcase at 7pm. Twenty-one local writers get two minutes each. This year’s host is the Capital Xtra DJ Jojo Silva.
The line-up was announced on 23 August. It includes the Rev Martine Oborne, vicar of St Michael’s Church on Elmwood Road, whose first novel is about a female priest whose bishop does not believe women should be ordained. Karen Liebreich, who founded the gardens charity Abundance London, is also speaking.
Thursday 10 September belongs to the Beatles. The festival is marking 60 years since the band filmed “Paperback Writer” in the gardens of Chiswick House, The director Tony Palmer, the broadcaster Samira Ahmed and the Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn take that as their subject at 7pm. At £17.50 it is the most expensive ticket of the week. The walk that retraces the filming, on Thursday afternoon, is the one that has sold out.
Friday 11 September has the two names most likely to fill a church: Nick Clegg at 6.15pm on regulating big tech, and Kate Mosse at 8pm on her new non-fiction book, interviewed by BookBrunch’s editor in chief. Before both, at 4.30pm, the prizes in the festival’s Young Poets competition are presented by the Hounslow community development officer and poet Christopher Jarvis. That one is free, but you have to book.
Saturday and Sunday carry the bulk of the programme, roughly a dozen time slots each, from cricket history at the Tabard at 10.30am on the Saturday through to Fergal Keane and a session on staying in control of AI at 8pm. Sunday ranges just as widely:
- Lord Alf Dubs on human rights, 12.30pm
- a gin and anchovy tasting with the Sipsmith co-founder Jared Brown, 1pm
- Jacqueline Wilson on her new children’s book, 2pm
- a screening of Quartermaine’s Terms at the Chiswick Cinema, 4.30pm
The festival closes on Monday 14 September at 7pm in Hogarth’s House on Hogarth Lane, where the arts journalist Holly EJ Black talks about the history of printmaking. It is the former home of William Hogarth, one of the trade’s most famous practitioners. The festival says that session is held in memory of the broadcaster Edward Stourton, who had been due to speak in that slot.
There is also a warm-up this Sunday, 30 August, outside the borough. ActOne Cinema at 121 High Street, Acton, just over a mile north of Chiswick and in the borough of Ealing, screens A Hard Day’s Night at 5pm. Samira Ahmed, who wrote the new BFI Classics book on the film, joins a conversation afterwards. The screening is run with the festival.
What is different this year
The programme was put together by a new group. The festival’s announcement in July says the long-standing programme director Jo James stepped down last autumn, and that director Torin Douglas has since worked with a team of book-trade people who live in or near Chiswick. Jacks Thomas, who co-founded the festival in 2009 and used to run the London Book Fair, is back as chair.
Two structural changes follow from that, and both affect what you will find in September:
- most children’s events have moved out of the September festival to a separate Children’s Books Day in March
- the number of weekend sessions has been reduced, which Douglas says is meant to “tighten up the programme and help it flow more smoothly”
So a family that used to treat the Saturday as a children’s day should check the programme rather than assume.
Where the money goes
The festival is not a commercial operation. It is run by the Parochial Church Council of St Michael and All Angels, Bedford Park, a registered charity, number 1133805, as part of its community outreach, and it donates all profit after costs.
Three reading and arts charities share the proceeds alongside the church:
- Read for Good, which funds books and storyteller visits for seriously ill children at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital
- Koestler Arts, the prison arts charity based in W12
- Read Easy Ealing, which gives one-to-one reading tuition to adults learning to read
The festival’s charities page says it has raised more than £170,000 since 2009. It also records that the cheques presented in February 2026 for the 2025 festival were announced as £5,500 to each charity but that an accounting error was found afterwards and the actual sum was £4,750 each. The festival says it has apologised and changed its procedures.
What it means for you
Book before you travel. Four sessions have gone already. Two of them are walks, which carry the smallest capacity of anything in the programme.
Prices are lower than they look from the headline acts. Most sessions are £10 or £12. The online Patrick Gale event on the Wednesday is £4, the guided walks are £15, and the Beatles evening at £17.50 is the top of the range. The Young Poets prizegiving on the Friday is free with booking.
Read the ticket conditions. The festival refunds only if an event is cancelled, so a change of plan will not get your money back. Children under 14 must be accompanied by an adult and each needs a ticket. Carers get a free ticket, and the festival asks you to contact the box office rather than book online, because not all its venues are easy to get into.
Check the updates page again nearer the time. It is where chairs and speakers change, and two chairs have already been swapped since the printed brochure went to press at the start of July.
More things to do locally are on our things to do in Chiswick page, and if you are travelling in, our Chiswick roadworks and travel page has what is shut this month.
Have your say
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