Slaughter in Southwold crime festival returns for 11th year

May 1, 2025
April 30, 2025
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Lucy Neill
Slaughter in Southwold

Calling all crime fiction fans! Slaughter in Southwold will return this June for its 11th year. This year’s programme takes place from Saturday 14 to Sunday 16 June and features a variety of crime and thriller novelists.

Slaughter in Southwold is part of Southwold Arts Festival and all events will be held at Southwold Arts Centre. The festival is organised by Southwold Library with support from the Friends of Southwold Library and the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA). Previous authors have included Anthony Horowitz, Nicci French, Elly Griffiths and many more.

Individual author events are available to book for £6 each. You can also book an All Day Saturday ticket, All Day Sunday ticket or a Weekend Pass. All tickets are available to book online via TicketSource.

The full line-up of authors this year is:

  • Maureen Paton – Saturday 14 June at 10AM. Maureen’s debut novel The Mystery at Rake Hall follows C.S. Lewis as an unlikely detective in post-war Oxford.
  • Robert Goddard – Saturday 14 June at 11.30AM. Robert is the bestselling author of several novels and was awarded the CWA’s Diamond Dagger for a lifetime achievement in crime writing.
  • Barbara Nadel – Saturday 14 June at 2PM. Barbara is the award-winning author of the Ikmen series, now on TV as The Turkish Detective.  
  • Kate Ellis – Saturday 14 June at 3.30PM. Kate has written 28 novels featuring archaeology graduate DI Wesley Peterson, and five crime novels with a supernatural twist featuring DI Joe Plantagenet.
  • Jayne Chard – Sunday 15 June at 10AM. Jayne is a multi-award-winning film and TV drama producer. More Than Murder is the first in her new cosy crime series.
  • Chris Hammer – Sunday 15 June at 11.30AM. Author of the internationally bestselling Martin Scarsden series. His latest book The Broken River is full of unmissable thrills and jaw-dropping twists.
  • Tim Sullivan – Sunday 15 June at 2PM. Author of the critically-acclaimed DS Georgie Cross series which has sold half a million copies. Tim’s latest in the series is The Bookseller.
  • M.J. Alridge and Lisa Hall – Sunday 15 June at 3.30PM. Alridge (author of Eeny Meeny) and Hall (author of Between You and Me) have co-written a new gripping psychological thriller The Mistake, all about the deadly secrets your family can keep.

As with previous years, Slaughter in Southwold will also feature a special murder-mystery dinner on Friday 13 June, this time from the pen of bestselling author Kate Ellis. Enjoy a delicious meal from Café 51 and test your abilities as a sleuth!

There will also be a crime quiz on Saturday 14 June after the day of talks. Get together in teams of up to four people and test your knowledge on vaguely crime-related quiz rounds for the chance to be crowned the champions.

Charlotte Clark is the manager at Southwold Library and organises the festival in collaboration with Southwold Arts Centre. Charlotte said:

“We are delighted to be welcoming back some old friends to Slaughter in Southwold this year as well as some first timers.  Between them the authors cover a great spectrum of crime fiction, as well as a number of continents!  Barbara Nadel returns to the festival after ten years, a decade that has seen her Ikmen series become a hit on the small screen.  Robert Goddard and M.J. Arlidge are two more welcome returners with both having developed new book series and standalone projects in the meantime.  

“And we are delighted that Kate Ellis, who has written our last 3 murder mystery dinners, can also make an in-person appearance this year.  Plus, we have debut authors Maureen Paton and Jayne Chard (the Producer from the legendary
Silent Witness), the bestselling Tim Sullivan and, all the way from Australia, Chris Hammer.”

For more information and to book tickets, visit suffolklibraries.co.uk/slaughter.

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