Birmingham Book Festival Announces Line-up of Six Debut Novelists and New Writers’ Mentoring Scheme
14 October 2026
The festival is using debut-fiction events, career workshops, and industry networking to support emerging writers in Birmingham and beyond.
Six debut novelists will take centre stage at this year's Birmingham Book Festival, as the event refocuses on boosting writing talent from across the region.
Voices From Our Regions: Debut Fiction
The festival's most prominent new attraction is a debut fiction panel titled “Voices From Our Regions: Debut Fiction”. Three authors – Laura Blake, Manish Chauhan, and Sufiyaan Salam – will discuss their new novels with the audience. The panel, held at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on the 11th of October, 3.30pm to 4.30pm, spotlights three books: Blake's *Go Home, Birdie Brown*, Chauhan's *Belgrave Road*, and Salam's *Wimmy Road Boyz*.
“The Birmingham Literature Festival has long aimed to shine a light on a more diverse range of stories from across the region," said the festival. "This year, three exciting writers are making their mark with nuanced novels anchored in locations outside London.”
National publisher Wasafiri, which is running the panel, describes the event as celebrating "new fiction set outside the borders of the M25", and writers who are making their mark from those "perceived peripheries" of the industry.
Careers in Writing
The festival has formulated an entire day's events on the “Careers in Writing” theme, which are aimed at supporting young writers aged between 14 and 24. As an example of how they will aid writers at different life stages, the festival has incorporated the Women’s Prize Trust’s “Discoveries” programme. This initiative aims to support unpublished women writers from the UK or Ireland by inviting them to submit the opening 10,000 words of a novel. More than a dozen of the longlisted writers from the programme have gone on to secure literary representation.
The festival's programme director, Emma Smith, confirmed that other mentoring schemes and career-guidance workshops are in the works, with plans to offer tailored support at each stage of the collaborative journey from personal story to sold novel. “There is vast talent in this city and we're determined to use everything we can to help this breakthrough”, said Smith.
Literary organisers in Birmingham have shown increasing determination to put the city on the map for writing in the UK. In 2012, the festival – then known as the Birmingham Book Festival, and focussed somewhat more "up the M40" towards London – announced a partnership with Writing West Midlands to establish a "year-round programme of writer development opportunities and literature events" based in the Library of Birmingham. In 2011, the festival drew 3,000 people for a 35-event programme across the city, before the Library of Birmingham building reopening and their renaming as the Birmingham Literature Festival in 2012. Later festival events have hosted talks, workshops and performances by well-known authors and practitioners, such as Alan Hollinghurst and publishers Nine Arches Press and Flarestack Poets.
In the same planning document published this year featuring Yorkshire-born writer Blake, Midlands-born Indian writer Chauhan, and Islamic art graduate Salam, the Birmingham Literature Festival considers itself to be "the biggest literature event in the region".