Previous Festivals | Bury St Eds Lit Fest

Tickets for our 2026 festival will go on sale in spring.

Continue reading below to find out more about our guest authors from previous festivals.

2025

2024

2023

2022

Nicola Upson & Mandy Morton

authors of Dear Little Corpses & The Cat And The Pendulum

Real life partners Nicola and Mandy both write crime novels but of very different genres. Nicola writes historical crime fiction featuring Josephine Tey, a real-life crime novelist. Her latest novel Dear Little Corpses is set in Suffolk at the beginning of the Second World War when many children were evacuated from the cities.

“The obvious subject matter at the time that it was written, which was in the early days of lockdown, was separation. It was difficult to write about, but very easy to imagine. All the fear and uncertainty of a world on the brink of a war and also the pain of separation. That was very real to us,” said Nicola.

Mandy Morton writes crime novels to make you smile. Her No. 2 Feline Detective Agency series is set in an alternative cat world, which is much like our human one, with the exception that there aren’t any police in the picture. They feature Hettie Bagshot, a long-haired tabby cat whose whiskers twitch at the first sign of a mystery, and her best friend Tilly Jenkins. They are brimming with puns, food, and fun but also solid mysteries, many of which are by no means as cosy as you might expect. In Mandy’s latest book, The Cat and the Pendulum, Hettie and Tilly are called in to investigate Agatha Crispy’s stolen manuscript.

Nicola was born in Bury St Edmunds and is a Patron of the Festival. She started as an arts journalist and writer and she originally planned to write a biography of Josephine Tey, a complex and multi-talented woman who had fascinated Nicola for many years. However, in the end, Nicola decided to tell Tey’s life through a series of fictional murder mysteries, which is the genre she is best known for these days. Nicola’s novels draw on all the much-loved conventions of the Golden Age writers and are underpinned by sound historic research, though she gives her stories a very contemporary twist.

Nicola has been long and short listed for the CWA Gold Dagger Award and the CWA Sapere Books Historical Dagger.

Mandy Morton began her professional life as a musician with Cambridge folk rock band, Spriguns. Her songwriting formed the basis of six albums during the 1970s and early 1980s, when she toured extensively with the band and then as a solo artist both here and in Scandinavia. More recently, she has worked as a freelance arts journalist for national and local radio, specialising in making music and theatre documentary. She is the co-author of a non-fiction theatre book, In Good Company. It was after retiring from her broadcasting career that she started writing her novels, spurred on by Nicola. PD James called them ‘Original and intriguing… a world without people which cat lovers will enter and enjoy.’