Wessex Children's Book Festival 2008

Read the full report of Wessex 2008

A huge audience of between 8-10,00 children and their carers attended Wessex Children's Book Festival events in the last week of November, providing a fantastic finale to this year's National Year of Reading. The Gala Weekend on 29 and 30 November was held at Winchester Guildhall and thousands of book fans braved the freezing weather to meet Charlie Higson, Terry Pratchett, Malorie Blackman, Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell, Anthony Browne, Axel Scheffler, Julie Sykes, Marcia Williams and Emma Dodd - not to mention Elmer, Horrid Henry and Maisy Mouse!

The festival provides a great opportunity to enthuse young people about books and reading and the impact of the week is felt in schools and libraires for months afterwards, with children doing follow-up work in schools and borrowing 'their' author's books from libraries. We hope that those of you who came along enjoyed yourselves as much as we did!

Desert Island Books

During the course of the festival week, we asked our visiting authors for their two 'desert island' book choices:

their favourite book as a child
their favourite book now