Festival of Words: Author Panel

Festival of Words Author Panel and Book signing £5 Pop up shop with Drake the bookshop

1:30-2:30pm with time for book signings

Join us for an hour of fascinating conversation with three award-winning writers from the north east of England. HF Askwith, Matt Wesolowski and Françoise Harvey write adult and YA fiction with a focus on horror, weird fiction and fantasy. All three writers will be answering questions put to them by the panel host, Sarah Wilson.

This will be your chance to hear about the inspiration behind their writing, their writing journeys and to ask questions about the wider publishing world.

There will also be an opportunity to buy books from Drake the Bookshop’s pop-up shop and authors will be signing books at the end of the event.

H.F. Askwith is the author of three YA gothic fantasy thrillers – A Dark Inheritance, A Cruel Twist of Fate and Half A Dark Heart. She is a Northern Writers' Award winner and has an MA in Creative Writing. When she's not writing, she loves solving puzzles, playing board games with her family and running.

Matt Wesolowski is an author from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, He is a former English teacher for young people in the PRU and care systems. He is a tutor for Faber Academy and runs creative writing groups for New Writing North.

Matt is the author of the 'Six Stories' series published by Orenda. His work has been longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and won the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Independent Voice Book of the Year.

He wrote '(Dont) Call Mum', a novella for the Northern Weird Project, published by Wild Hunt in 2025 and is due to appear in the 'Beasts of England Anthology' published by Dead Ink in September 2026.

Françoise Harvey has had short stories published in various horror and weird fiction magazines (Weird Horror, Black Static, The Dark etc), as well as several less-weird fiction places, including Best British Short Stories 2017. She was the recipient of a Northern Writers Award in 2017, DYCP funding in 2020, and was one of the 2024-25 cohort of the mentoring programme Writers’ Block North East, through which she found her literary agent. She’s currently working on getting her first novel published.