A little over a month to wait until this year's Brontë Women’s Writing Festival

Keighley News announces the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival event, which will feature Emerald Fennell, even though it's already sold out, as well as some other events.

The director of a new Wuthering Heights film starring Margot Robbie will be a guest at this year’s Brontë Women’s Writing Festival.

Taking place in Haworth, the festival will celebrate novelists and the north – with a focus on Bradford district in its year as UK City of Culture, and the home of the Brontës.

Actor, writer and film-maker Emerald Fennell, who wrote and directed cult hit Saltburn, will discuss her much-anticipated big-screen version of Wuthering Heights, filmed in the Yorkshire Dales this year and set for release early in 2026.

Other guests include best-selling author Tracy Chevalier, who wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Australian author and TV presenter Holly Ringland, reflecting on how their writing has been shaped by the Brontë legacy.

This year’s festival theme is Writers From and Based in the North, with a focus on stories shaped by northern landscapes and the influences of the Brontë sisters, and showcasing new work from northern publishers.

Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, says: “This year at the museum, we’ve fully embraced our role in Bradford’s growing creative story, and this continues through the festival. Packed with guests and events that inspire and ignite the imagination, we’re especially excited about the four writers we’ve worked with in collaboration with Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture and the Writers Project of Ghana.

“As children in Haworth, the Brontë siblings dreamed up a series of imaginary worlds – including Angria, a fantastical kingdom that maps directly onto the coast of West Africa. We know the family would be thrilled that four emerging writers have created new stories inspired by Angria but rooted in their own imaginations.”

Claire Govender and Kristina Diprose from Bradford and Akorfa Dawson and Peggy Kere Osman from Ghana revisit the Brontës' world of Angria, for a new collection of stories and animations.

Other festival events include Irish Trinidadian author Amanda Smyth and West Yorkshire’s SJ Bradley and Anna Chilvers in conversation with Brontë Society chair Lucy Powrie; best-selling Bingley author Linda Green chatting with writers including Bradford-based Sairish Hussain; and arts writer Yvette Huddleston exploring historical fiction set in Yorkshire and northern folklore with Bradford’s Rachel Bower and Jennie Godfrey, author of best-seller The List of Suspicious Things.

Prospective authors can sign up for Writing a Novel courses with Linda Green, in person and online. The festival runs from September 26-28.

A contributor to Epigram writes about the joys of reading the classics.

Whilst I have very little idea about what to do with my English degree once my final year is over, I am so glad I picked this subject. The books and authors I have discovered through this course have showed me that there is so much more to reading than the literary canon. I do still enjoy watching Shakespeare, and Jane Eyre was brilliantly written, but there are other novels and plays out there too. (Kashvi Cox)