Happy New Year to you all from the Book Festival team. We haven’t had a lot of rest over Christmas and January – we are busy planning for 2011 and beyond.

We have given the website a bit of an overhaul. We hope you find it easier to use. We will be adding more to it over the next few months as we move towards the big ‘moments’ in the Birmingham Book Festival calendar.

Following in the footsteps of our first ever Spring Festival (The Spring Thing) last year, we have another mini-festival to offer you in 2011.

The Spring Thing 2011 : Saturday 9th & Sunday 10th April.

This will be a fantastic weekend of literary events and workshops in Birmingham – the kind of thing you’ve come to expect from us and maybe some new things, too!

So far we can tell you we will be featuring some great literature, including crime/psychological thriller writer Sophie Hannah (if you haven’t read a Sophie Hannah novel yet, this should be your year – there are six of them now and Point of Rescue will be hitting your screens as an ITV drama in March..), a Book Festival Debate , a readers group, an evening of poetry in performance, workshops on many aspects of creative writing, and an intriguing non-fiction event that we think will surprise and delight.. Oh, and there will definitely be cake. More details as soon as we can release them, and a full programme and tickets will be available  in February.

The Festival Bookshop, well loved in October, will be back. This is the place to hang out , listen to music, talk, drink tea, buy books and bump into writers and other readers.

We’ve also got a very exciting event planned for later in April that, for now, is under wraps – but we’ll tell you as soon as we can.

You might want to follow us on twitter, for all the latest and to let us know what you would like to see at this Festival and the next (October 4-20th 2011), which we are also starting to put together.

In the meantime there are other things to look forward to. Forthcoming open mic nights with guest writers in partnership with the Hippodrome, for one…. Watch this space.

Hoping you’re all having a good 2011 so far – our feet have hardly touched the floor!