STROUD Book Festival opens this week, with a sparkling array of Five Valleys’ literary talent; showcased in author talks, events and children’s activities.

The festival starts on Friday and runs for 10 days, with more than 40 events featuring nearly 60 local authors and illustrators.

Some of the area’s best authors will be appearing, including: Ian McEwan, Jamila Gavin, Michael Horovitz, Kate Riordan, Murray Lachlan Young, Katie Fforde, Bel Mooney and Sue Limb.

They are joined by the likes of Rachel Joyce, Nikki Owen, Jacki Kabler, Alice Jolly, Hassan Akkad, Hannah Shaw, John Dougherty, Tom Percival, Cindy Jefferies, Eugene Lambert and many more.

Poet Adam Horovitz is releasing a new, book-sized pamphlet this month to coincide with his Inheriting the Mantle event, taking place at the festival on Sunday.

Love in a Celebrity Climate is a furious little book of satirical, political and topical performance poetry that stares unblinkingly down both scraped barrels of the tabloid arsenal and takes a swipe at all-comers — be they David Hasselhof, terrorists of any stripe, celebrity cannibals, the England football squad, the Royal Family, Brexit, ATOS, banks or the advertising industry.

“These are poems to be spoken aloud — as loud as possible,” said Adam.

“A quiet part of me has always enjoyed the noisy performance side of poetry, the act of getting up in a club or bar and spitting words into a microphone, despite the fact that I more usually write in a quieter, more measured voice nowadays.

“Releasing Love in a Celebrity Climate was a chance to feel the noise again.”

Some of the poems were written while he was poet-in-residence for the Borkowski PR company’s website, where his remit was to write topical poems that dug under the skin of ‘celebrities, politicians and other scoundrels’, but many more of them are very recent, triggered by events in the news.

“The book is laid out in three sections, almost as if it were an evening of watching TV,” said Adam.

“It starts with a celebrity section, which is followed by an advertisement break and closes with the news.”

Love in a Celebrity Climate is released under the Little Metropolis imprint, priced £6.50 and is available via: littlemetropolis.bandcamp.com

Inheriting the Mantle sees Adam in conversation with Rick Vick, as part of Stroud Book Festival, at the Sub Rooms on Sunday at 6pm.