There are some 50 events in the Festival's Books And Debate programme, but only one novelist has been invited to appear at its central venue.

And he's probably also the only literary speaker who has spoken about "that terrible feeling you're making no impression on a novel at all and you're 30 pages in and there's 472 pages left and you've been reading it for three weeks already".

With his first three books, Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About A Boy - all of which have been made into Hollywood Blockbusters.

Nick Hornby created the whole new genre of "lad's lit". Whether in the Arsenal Terraces, an independent record shop or a single parent support group, he set about tracking the contemporary angst of the normal bloke.

And he did so with such humour and honesty that he bridged the gap between popular and critically-acclaimed fiction, leading one reviewer to insist that he "should write for England".

Hornby is in Brighton to talk about his latest novel, A Long Way Down, a sort of "suicide romp" in which four narrators, all planning to kill themselves on New Year's Eve, meet on top of a North London high-rise.

But, from a writer who litters his works with modern references, you can expect the conversation to range wide.

"It seemed odd to me," he says, "that most of us bring up families and go to work and yet the books our male representatives are writing about are huge things in history and people on the edge.

"There did seem to be a bit of a hole where no-one was writing about what actually happened."