Every February, as the azaleas are budding under the city’s moss-draped oaks, Savannah rolls out the red carpet for a diverse group of carefully selected authors, both well-known and emerging. In 2023, the Savannah Book Festival (SBF) will celebrate its 16th year as one of the most renowned invitation-only literary festivals in the country, February 16-19.
The Savannah Book Festival is comprised of four different events – three headliners, and the main festival event, “Festival Saturday”.
The three headliners will speak at ticketed events, for which information can be found on the festival’s website. Tickets are not required for Festival Saturday, and all of the Savannah public is invited.
The weekend begins with an opening address on Thurs., Feb. 16, this year given by New York Times bestselling author and former Navy SEAL Jack Carr.
Carr, who lives in Park City, Utah, is the author of “The Terminal List,” “True Believer,” “Savage Son,” “The Devil’s Hand,” and “In the Blood.”
His debut novel, “The Terminal List,” was adapted into the No. 1 Amazon Prime Video series starring Chris Pratt. He is also the host of the top-rated podcast “Danger Close.”
This year’s keynote address will be on Friday, Feb. 17, by mystery novelists Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.
Preston has published 36 books of both nonfiction and fiction, of which 29 have been New York Times bestsellers. He is the co-author (with Child) of the “Pendergast” series of thrillers. He writes about archaeology and anthropology for the “The New Yorker,” worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University.
He currently serves as President of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest association of authors and journalists.
Lincoln Child was born in Westport, CT, and attended Carleton College, where he graduated with distinction in English.
Over the next several years, he climbed his way up the editorial ladder, becoming a full editor, working on literally hundreds of titles both fiction and non-fiction, and founding the publishing house’s mass-market horror line. Among the authors he groomed for their first full-length book publication was Douglas Preston.
Child went on to collaborate with Preston on their own jointly written thriller, “Relic,” which went on to become a bestselling book and a No. 1 box office film. This established them as a writing team, and the two have gone on to write some three dozen joint novels, many featuring the enigmatic FBI agent Pendergast, and two of which were named in an NPR poll of readers as among the 100 greatest thrillers of all time.
Most of their novels have become New York Times bestsellers, several of which have reached No. 1.
Festival Saturday, the weekend’s main event, takes place on Saturday, February 18th, and is free and open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The full schedule can be found, digitally downloaded, or printed on the festival’s website, under the “Festival Saturday” tab.
The weekend will conclude with a closing address on Sunday, Feb. 19, from David Maraniss.
Maraniss is a New York Times best-selling author, a fellow of the Society of American Historians, and a visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University.
He has been affiliated with The Washington Post for more than 40 years as an editor and writer.
In 1993, he received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of former president Bill Clinton, and in 2007 he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting.
He was also a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including for one of his books, “They Marched into Sunlight.”
He has won many other major writing awards, including the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, the Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Frankfurt eBook Award.
“A Good American Family” is his 12th book. He and his wife Linda split time between Washington, D.C., and in their hometown, Madison, WI.
For more information and a full schedule of events, visit savannahbookfestival.org
