MORPETH BOOK FESTIVAL 2026
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Saturday 21 March 2026
The Chantry, Morpeth at 3pm
Local author shares the compelling journey behind his latest book A Sandhills Legacy
What is success for a writer?
Is it money? Is it fame? Or could it be something less tangible, but just as sweet?
When Durham writer Alan Wilkinson decided to quit work and follow his dream he was inspired by American authors like John Steinbeck, Henry David Thoreau and Jack Kerouac. Forty years on, he decides to hit the road once more and see how his career compares with those of his heroes.
In A Measure of Success he takes the reader on a coast-to-coast pilgrimage across America, beginning at Walden Pond, where he remembers Thoreau’s call to live frugally and study Nature. At Jack Kerouac’s grave-side he reflects on the way On The Road inspired him to spurn a conventional pathway and dedicate himself to his craft. Then he heads west to pay his respects to Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain.
Alan’s career was never like his heroes’. In his attempts to survive by the pen he took whatever jobs would pay the bills. He ghosted memoirs: for an international dope-smuggler, for Britain’s only bounty hunter, for a cricketer, a retired cop.
He wrote a clutch of company histories, and when the work dried up he put in a winter season in a sugar-beet factory. Against those rocky times he can weigh the day he secured a six-figure advance, a lucrative spell writing for a TV soap, an award for the Cricket Book of the Year, and the sweet irony of a residency at the Jack Kerouac House in Florida.
Reviewing a lifetime of such adventures, Wilkinson arrives in California still seeking a definition of success that will give him peace of mind before his journey ends.
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Printed tickets are on sale (from 7 November 2025) at the Chantry (Tourist Information Centre)