Huddersfield Literature Festival: An Afternoon with Rachel Joyce

The award-winning and multi-million-copy bestselling author of novels such as The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Perfect chats about her latest novel: The Homemade God.

A brother and three sisters gather at the family’s lakeside house in Italy. Their father, a famous artist, has recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped there to finish his masterpiece. Now he is dead and there is no sign of a painting. A beautifully observed novel about fame, the fragility and enduring quality of art, sibling relationships and rivalry, and how we learn to emerge from the history of our family to become who we are.

Rachel Joyce is the author of the Sunday Times and international bestsellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North, The Music Shop, Miss Benson’s Beetle, and short story collection A Snow Garden & Other Stories. Her books have been translated into 37 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The critically acclaimed film of the novel, for which Rachel also wrote the screenplay, was released in 2023. Miss Benson’s Beetle won the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize in 2021. Rachel was awarded the Specsavers National Book Awards New Writer of the Year in December 2012 and was shortlisted for the UK Author of the Year in 2014. In 2024 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Kingston University. Rachel has written over 20 original afternoon plays and adaptations of the classics for BBC Radio 4, including major adaptations of all of the Brontë novels.

Early bird tickets £8 (£5 conc) available to 22 April.

Access and Covid safety measures: if you have specific access needs or queries and/or prefer to be seated away from other audience members as a Covid safety measure, please contact our Admin at: info@huddlitfest.org.uk with your request.