Cheltenham Literature Festival 2025 revives The Big Read
Cheltenham Literature Festival ran from 10 to 19 October 2025 with more than 400 events, four guest curators and the return of its Big Read.
The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival took place from 10 to 19 October 2025, with more than 400 events. The guest curators were Geoff Dyer for memoir and poetry, Tracy Borman for history, Jamie Smart for the family and young adult strand, and Ann Morgan for international fiction.
The festival brought back The Big Read after a gap of about a decade, choosing Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time. Its Read the World strand, devoted to international writing, reached its fifth year, and the programme marked 80 years of Cheltenham Festivals and 160 years of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Names announced included Ian McEwan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Samantha Harvey, Simon Armitage and Jacqueline Wilson.
The organisers said around 30 per cent of the programme was free, including bookshop crawls and a number of family events.
A town-wide shared read is a modest idea, but it is one of the few festival formats built around a single book rather than a single appearance. For readers it is an easy way in; for authors and publishers it shows how much a festival can do for one title when it chooses to.
Source: Cheltenham Festivals: 2025 full programme announcement.