Two fine new authors discuss their debut work with Andrew Holgate, literary editor of The Sunday Times. The festival is committed to showcasing new writing so we are delighted to welcome Grace McCleen, author of The Land of Decoration, and Charlotte Rogan, author of The Lifeboat. Both were picked out by Holgate in The Sunday Times last December as the authors of outstanding debuts, and two of the fiction highlights of 2012.

The Land of Decoration features a miniature world imagined by the 10-year-old narrator Judith McPherson.  Judith’s mother has died and her father is a member of an eccentric religious sect. McCleen was brought up in a fundamentalist religion and says she was transformed by her experience of studying English literature at the University of Oxford.

The lifeboat of the second novel’s title is home to a group of survivors for three weeks after an explosion sinks their ship. The story follows their struggle for survival and the aftermath, as the main character Grace Winter finds herself on trial for her life.  Rogan graduate from Princeton University in 1975 and did many jobs before writing her debut novel.