My wife, Kay Dunbar, who has died aged 78, was a literature festival director and co-owner, with me, of Ways With Words, which organised and ran festivals across the UK from 1992 to 2022, as well as creative writing holidays in Italy, France and Devon, our home county.
Kay had moved to Devon in 1986 to help set up a primary school at Dartington Hall. In 1991, seeing an opportunity to create a festival of literature at the historic house and estate, she began organising the first Ways With Words. Initially sponsored by the Observer, with the former editor David Astor as president, the festival launched in the summer of 1992 as an eight-day event of talks, readings and workshops, with speakers including Anthony Burgess, Andrew Motion, Fiona MacCarthy and Peter Ackroyd, and accommodation offered in the buildings and grounds of Dartington Hall.
