Saturday 06 June 2026, 4.00pm
Colchester Samaritans, Walsingham Road Community Hall, 34 Walsingham Road, Colchester, Essex, CO2 7BN

Booker Prize longlisted author Siân Hughes joins us to discuss her latest novel, No Such Thing As Monday. Raw, exhilarating, and full of heart it confirms Hughes as a masterful chronicler of life lived on the edge, and people at their most vulnerable.

‘A stunningly frank and darkly funny novel of loneliness and resilience. I loved it.‘
— Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry

Tickets: £10 / £8 (students, under 27s and unwaged)
Box Office: essexbookfestival.org.uk or Mercury Theatre 01206 573948

Part of our Love & Loss day at Colchester Samaritans.

Event Information

💬 The event will include an audience Q&A session.
📚 Copies of the book will be available to purchase on the night.
🖊️ After the event there will be an opportunity to get the book signed by the author.
🪑 Seats are unallocated.
☕ Colchester Samaritans are kindly offering refreshments at this event – donations to Samaritans welcome.
🚗 There is limited free parking at the school next to the hall. Parking details will be sent to ticket-holders a few days before the event. The nearest public car park is St Johns Multi Storey which is opposite the Samaritans Hall on the other side of Southway or St Mary’s Multi Storey is a 10 minute walk away.
♿ The venue is wheelchair accessible. There are disabled facilities on site.

Siân Hughes

Photo of Siân Hughes © Stretton Studios

Siân Hughes is a writer who grew up in a small village in Cheshire. Her first collection of poetry The Missing was a Poetry Society Recommendation, longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, shortlisted for the Felix Dennis and the Aldeburgh prizes, and won the Seamus Heaney Award.

Siân’s first novel Pearl was longlisted for The Booker Prize 2023 and shortlisted for The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2024.

No Such Thing As Monday

Steffie spends her days working in a dry-cleaner’s, trying to scrub the world clean one garment at a time. But no matter how spotless the clothes, she can’t rid herself of the guilt and grime she feels inside.

Haunted by what happened to her sister when they were children, large fragments of which she can’t fully remember, Steffie is stuck in a loop of self-destruction, defiance, and shame.

When her violent, bullying father dies suddenly, it sparks a reckoning that cracks open her past. What follows is an unexpectedly redemptive journey of a woman trying to piece herself together in a world that failed to make space for her.

Raw, exhilarating, and full of heart, No Such Thing as Monday confirms Sian Hughes as a masterful chronicler of life lived on the edge, and people at their most vulnerable.

‘A stunningly frank and darkly funny novel of loneliness and resilience. I loved it.‘
— Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry

‘In Steffie, Sian Hughes has created one of the most powerful, highly original and hilarious voices in fiction. What she suffers is almost unbearable and yet her resilience knocks the stuffing out of it. It’s deftly woven, the writing is delicious, and it hit my heart like a hammer blow.‘
— Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

‘I was blindsided by the brilliance of this novel.‘
— Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss

‘Richly absorbing and powerful – a ’read to the small hours,’ novel. Steffie has a unique voice that keeps you glued to her story, and that I absolutely loved.’
— Kate Hamer, author of The Girl in the Red Coat

Order a copy of the book from bookshop.org.

The post No Such Thing As Monday appeared first on Essex Book Festival.

Saturday 06 June 2026, 2.00pm
Colchester Samaritans, Walsingham Road Community Hall, 34 Walsingham Road, Colchester, CO2 7BN

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2026
Winner of the Nero Non-Fiction Award 2025
A Book of the Year for The Times, Guardian, Financial Times and Observer.

Tickets: £10 / £8 (students, under 27s and unwaged)
Box Office: essexbookfestival.org.uk or Mercury Theatre 01206 573948

This event is part of our Love & Loss day of events at Colchester Samaritans on Saturday 06 June.

Sarah Perry

Photo of Sarah Perry © Sophie Davidson

Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Enlightenment, Melmoth, The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year Award and the British Book of the Year Award. Enlightenment was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 and her other work has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Death of an Ordinary Man

An unflinching and profoundly moving account of caring until death, from Booker-Prize-longlisted Sarah Perry.

Sarah Perry’s father-in-law, David, died at home nine days after a cancer diagnosis and having previously been in the good health. The speed of his illness outstripped that of the NHS and social care, so the majority of nursing fell to Sarah and her husband. They witnessed what happens to the body and spirit, hour by hour, as it approaches death.

Death of an Ordinary Man is an unstinting account of death by cancer, a reportage into the daily experience of caring, an exploration of the structural conditions of dying in the UK, and most importantly a testament to David’s life, that of an ordinary man.

Unflinching and profoundly moving, Sarah Perry confronts the taboo surrounding death and shows us how to confront all of the terror and beauty that comes with the end of life – and how the saddest thing she has ever seen is also the best thing she’s ever done.

Now I understand there are no ordinary lives – that every death is the end of a single event in time’s history: an event so improbable as to be miraculous, and irreplaceable in every particular.

In Death of an Ordinary Man, Sarah Perry brings her Booker-shortlisted novelists eye to her first full length work of non-fiction. A genre defying work of extraordinary empathy and power with all the qualities that make her fiction so compelling.

Read the Guardian review of Death of an Ordinary Man: A brilliant meditation on mortality.

The post Death of An Ordinary Man appeared first on Essex Book Festival.

Saturday 06 June 2026, 12.45pm – 1.30pm
Colchester Samaritans
Walsingham Road Community Hall, 34 Walsingham Road, Colchester, CO2 7BN

Join us as we celebrate the Essex life of ‘BBC legend’ and festival patron, Dave Monk, who sadly died last year. We will be sharing fond and funny memories, talking about Dave’s memoir, Whatever Happened to Dave Monk? and the contribution he made to Essex and Essex Book Festival.

Tickets: Free, donation to Kids Inspire or Farleigh Hospice kindly welcomed (donation links below) – both are charities which were close to Dave’s heart.

Places are limited so please reserve a space at Eventbrite.co.uk.

Copies of Dave’s memoir will be available to buy at the event.

Kids Inspire is a children’s mental health charity supporting children and families who would not otherwise be able to afford specialist trauma recovery support.
Find out more and donate here.

Farleigh Hospice provides hospice care to people affected by life-limiting illnesses and bereavement across mid Essex.
Find out more and donate here.

Part of our Love & Loss day of events at Colchester Samaritans.

Whatever Happened to Dave Monk? The Essex life of a ‘BBC legend’

A few months into writing his memoir, Dave Monk received some devastating news. The recently retired BBC Essex presenter was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The former solicitor, disc jockey, wine bar owner and compere had a seemingly endless stash of riveting stories to tell, so he naturally included his cancer tales.

Much of this entertaining autobiography shamelessly name drops the many fascinating individuals Dave has encountered and interviewed. He tells of his evening with a murderer, recalls his argument with a pop superstar, reveals what he said to the President of France and shares what he’s learned over the years from his favourite pastime – eavesdropping.

From family secrets to his love of dressing up, Dave tells all.

As a hugely popular presenter on BBC Essex over five decades, Dave spoke with the famous, the infamous, the happy and the miserable, delving deep into the real stories and people of the much-maligned county of Essex.

Now it’s time for Dave’s own story after decades of keeping his own counsel.

Order a copy of  Whatever Happened to Dave Monk?

The post A Celebration of Dave Monk appeared first on Essex Book Festival.

Saturday 06 June 2026, 10.30am – 12.00pm
Colchester Samaritans, Walsingham Road Community Hall, 34 Walsingham Road, Colchester, CO2 7BN

Drawing on his new collection, Father Myself, James McDermott will lead a special writing workshop to help you to re-see bereavement, grief and emotional loss. This inclusive and interactive workshop is designed for writers of all abilities – all welcome.

Tickets: £20 / £15 concessions (students, under 27s and unwaged)
Box Office: Eventbrite.co.uk

Part of our Love & Loss day of events at Colchester Samaritans

Father Myself, James McDermott

In 2022, James McDermott lost his sixty-year-old father to COVID after three weeks in intensive care. In Father Myself, his second collection from Nine Arches Press, McDermott explores his father’s complex illness and death; grief; growth and how as a queer boy then a bereaved son, he had to learn to father himself.

In clear-sighted and often hard-hitting poems, McDermott takes the reader onto the frontline of the pandemic – documenting the experience and trauma of a COVID-bereaved family with an unflinching eye. Both powerful and compassionate, these extraordinary poems have the capacity to go beyond simply a record of events, reaching sensitively for the human details that matter – the beat of a heart and movement of breath, the touch of a hand, the words we use for goodbye.

Praise for Father Myself:

‘Father Myself is a bright devastation of a book, a meditation on father-son love, queerness, loss, imperfection, and a man slowly becoming his own father. Lyrical, haunting and exquisitely rendered.’
– Joelle Taylor

‘This is emotional, gut-punching stuff. McDermott’s best work to date.’
– Luke Wright

Buy a copy of the book from bookshop.org.

The post Grief Writing Workshop appeared first on Essex Book Festival.