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25 of the Best Annual Book Festivals Around The World

Cold and dreary January is the perfect month to make travel plans for the year ahead. And what better reason to embark on a new adventure than a beautiful book festival you’ve been dying to visit? With venues ranging from Indian palaces and ocean fronts lined with palm trees to eclectic English market towns, here’s our pick of the 25 best annual book festivals around the world.

 

1. Jaipur Literary Festival, India, January

While thinking of this dusty, provincial city usually brings images of spectacular pink palaces – still guarded by turban-wearing watches – to mind, Jaipur is actually making a big name for itself in the book world. Every January, the literary community gathers for the annual Jaipur Literary Festival, which is said to be the largest free book event in the world. From Nobel laureates to local language writers, Man Booker prize winners to debut novelists, the festival offers five days of readings, debates and discussions at the beautiful Diggi Palace in the Rajasthani capital. If we could go to one literary event in 2014, this would probably be it.

 

2. Hay Festival Cartagena, Colombia, January

Slightly more exotic than its Welsh counterpart, the Hay Festival Cartagena has become one of the most important literary events in the Hispanic world. Every year, a celebration of literature, visual arts, cinema, music, geopolitics, journalism and the environment takes over Colombia’s colourful walled city for four very lively days.

 

25 Beloved Book Series We Still Get Nostalgic About

Boarding school pranks, midnight feasts, crime solving kids, equine competitions and half-human, half-plant hybrids living in the basement. Long before Twilight and The Hunger Games dominated the market, and before we had the internet to distract us after school, these were just some of the storylines that kept us up late at night with a torch under the duvet.

From Malory Towers to Goosebumps and Judy Blume in between, join us as we pay homage to 25 book series we loved as kids and teens.

 

1. Malory Towers by Enid Blyton

While the first book of the Malory Towers series was published in 1946, girls of all ages have delighted in them for generations. Perhaps the most iconic of all boarding school stories, we grew up with Darrell and friends as they competed in hockey matches, crept out of their dormitories for midnight feasts by the rock pool and played tricks on the poor French mesdemoiselles. Oh, how we longed to be one of the gang with a trunk of our very own to pack before term started. We might have circled boarding schools in the Yellow Pages once or twice too, in an effort to drop hints to our parents.

 

2. St. Clare’s by Enid Blyton

Another boarding school, which pre-dated Malory Towers, the St. Clare’s series consisted of nine books absolutely brimming with madcap schemes, pranks, games and 1940s jollity. We followed twins Pat and Isabel O’Sullivan, hot-tempered Janet, steady head girl Hilary and mischievous Bobby all the way from their first form to fifth, and might have wept a little when we discovered the series ended there rather abruptly.

 

3. Judy Blume books