Marlborough LitFest is delighted to announce its first confirmed authors for this year’s festival, taking place from September 25-28.

The line up includes Louis de Bernières, Jenny Uglow, AC Grayling, Nina Stibbe, and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

The programme is currently being put together with a diverse selection of speakers throughout the festival weekend, featuring children’s authors, workshops, new and young fiction writers, crime writing authors and poetry events.

Louis de Bernières is most famous for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which sold more than 1.5 million copies and was made into a film with Penelope Cruz and John Hurt.

Acclaimed biographer, publisher and critic Jenny Uglow has written on Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth and Charles II and is editorial director of Chatto & Windus.

Nina Stibbe is the current new literary sensation – debut author of Love, Nina, which documents her time working in the 1980s as a naïve young country nanny to a literary family in North London who mixed on a daily basis with literary legends such as Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn.

AC Grayling is one of the UK’s pre-eminent philosophers as well as author of 30 books and is the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will be giving a talk on the war poets during the centenary of the start of the First Wold War. He has been an outspoken force for justice over the years, particularly regarding the evils of warfare.

Mavis Cheek, founder patron of the LitFest, said: “It's a terrific line up for 2014 and if our enthusiastic feedback from last year, and the rise in our audience numbers, is anything to go by, this year's festival will be the brightest and best so far.”

The Marlborough Litfest committee would like to thank our Founder Sponsor ALCS Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, lead sponsor Brewin Dolphin and events sponsors Hiscox Insurance, Knight Frank, and Duncan Morris Solicitors for their continued support.