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Even down a phone line and after a busy few weeks of meetings, negotiations and programming, you can just hear the passion in Fiona Gell’s voice when she talks about literature, its importance and how to encourage people to engage with it.

Gell is director of Big Bookend, one of the ten Leeds-based arts organsations – including The Leeds Library, Leeds Libraries, Chapel FM, the Carriageworks Theatre and Hyde Park Book Club – that last year set up a partnership to launch the first ever citywide literature festival.

The inaugural Leeds Litfest, which ran over five days in March 2019, featured around 30 events and was a huge success – it made it on to the shortlist for the Saboteur Awards National Lit Fest of the Year Award, no mean feat for a first-time festival.

Helen Fielding and Stuart Maconie among the big names as Leeds Lit Fest returns