The Book Festival Team
HENRY NORMAL
Director
Henry is a writer, poet, TV & Film producer, founder of the Manchester Poetry Festival (now the Literature festival) and co-founder of the Nottingham Poetry Festival.
In June 2017 he was honoured with a special BAFTA for services to Television. He co-wrote and script edited the multi-award winning Mrs Merton show and also co-created and co-wrote the first series of The Royle Family.
In 1990, Henry set up
Baby Cow Productions Ltd and Executive Produced all, and script edited many of the shows of it's 17 and a half year output -including the Oscar nominated film Philomena, Gavin and Stacey, Nighty Night, The Mighty Boosh, and Alan Partridge.
Since retiring in April 2016, Henry has written and performed numerous BBC Radio 4 shows combining comedy, poetry and stories about family.
Born in St Anne's, Nottingham in 1956, Henry now lives in Fairlight with his wife and screenwriter Angela Pell (Close to Me, Snowcake) and their son Johnny.
Henry performs poetry at Literature Festivals around the UK and has published more than a dozen poetry books. He was recently given an honourary doctorate of letters by Nottingham Trent University, another by Nottingham University and has a beer and a bus named after him in Nottingham!
TIM Barlow
Director
Tim Barlow is a performance poet and writer. His collection of poetry The Manufactured Thrill was published by Manchester's Flapjack Press in 2026. He regularly performs at spoken word events in Hastings and further afield, and hosts a popular monthly poetry open mic evening – A Load of Poets – in Hastings. In 2024 Tim won the Festival's annual open mic poetry competition, and has supported the BAFTA-winning poet and writer Henry Normal (a patron of the Festival) on a poetry tour of all seventeen public libraries in East Sussex. Tim was one of the organisers of the Book Festival Fringe in 2024 and 2025. He is also Chair of Hastings Writers Group and won their Writer of the Year trophy in 2025. He has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Hull University and works for a living as a law librarian. Born and bred in Derbyshire, he now lives on the West Hill in Hastings.
sam davey
Director
Sam Davey is the founder of the Hastings Book Festival. She has served as Chair of the Hastings Writers' Group for several years and is now its Programme Secretary. She is a Director of New Writing South and currently heads up the Digital Transformation Programme for the De La Warr Pavillion in Bexhill, where she lives.
She was the producer of the 2026 Tunbridge Wells Literary Festival, and has produced festivals, conferences and other large public events for over twenty years.
Sam is an arts administrator, festival producer and digital transformation specialist. She is also a prize-winning short story writer and the author of the novels Angels of Islington (Mirador, 2017), The Chosen Queen (Diversion Books/Simon and Schuster, 2025) and its sequel The Sisters and the Sword (Diversion Books/Simon and Schuster, 2026). She is the editor of “Reconquest” (Rough Magic books, October 2026), an anthology of local writing funded by the Norman Heritage fund, exploring how the words we use and the stories we tell were changed for ever by the events of 1066.