Until a couple of years ago, I only knew of two people who came from Stoke-on-Trent, both of them male. One was Stanley Matthews and the other was Arnold Bennett. I knew vaguely where Stoke was – somewhere in the industrial Midlands – and I associated it, even more vaguely, with Wedgwood china and with coalmines. But it had no pressing reality in my mind, until, that is, I wanted to set a novel in a muscular manufacturing business, and alighted, as my research victim, on pottery and the Emma Bridgewater factory.

The factory in Hanley, central Stoke, is not only a modern success story but also a compelling mixture of the best of the past and the present. Within living memory, people knew why they lived in Stoke: because they worked there, either down the pits or on the pots. Local coal and local clay meant work – too much of it, often – for all, and wealth, inevitably inequitably, for some. When Emma Bridgewater bought her rundown factory more than 20 years ago, she inherited neglected buildings and a small, demoralised workforce. Now her handmade (yes, over 25 separate pairs of hands touch each item) products support nearly 250 people and their families. The manufacturing methods are traditional: the whole place, factory, cafe, shop, are humming.

But it's rare. Not unique, but rare. Stoke is among the country's biggest cities, but it has some deeply troubling statistics that aren't irrelevant to its sprawling size and decayed industries. Leaving aside the blight of unemployment – only about 9,000 people are working in the pottery industry these days – Stoke manages to come about bottom of the league tables for seven-year-olds in reading, writing and maths.

And another, equally gloomy, statistic reports that 40% of Stoke's three-year-olds start their school life well below the national average of literacy awareness, let alone levels. The local branches of the NSPCC have some terrible stories to tell.

Yet I encountered extraordinary warmth in the streets and cafes of Stoke during my research trips. And I mean extraordinary. Thanks to a Labour councillor who showed me around, I saw plenty of benighted estates where there was nothing to do but smoke, apathetically propped against a doorpost, and yell at small boys dismantling a public litter bin. I saw endless stretches of public housing whose inhabitants no longer knew why they lived there. And doubtless didn't care, either. But on the shopping streets, the station platform, in the taxicabs, the museum cafes where tea arrives properly stewed in a metal pot, the warmth of the people was outstanding. They were so very – well, cosy is the word that comes to mind – that I got mildly addicted to going up to Stoke. Under an hour and a half from London, greeted by a statue of Josiah Wedgwood outside the station, the trips to Stoke became something very much more than just diligent journeys to get the feel of a place for a novel.

With people like these, no place is doomed for ever. A factory like Emma Bridgewater's is no sentimental Elysium, either, of perpetually purposeful and tractable workers going singing about their daily tasks, thankful to be in constructive jobs. It is a workplace with all the usual headaches, both human and technical, but it is a place of considerable comradeship, as well as skill, and pride in that skill. It is a place that demonstrates what the people of Stoke can do with their lives and their talents, and at the same time shows up the great gulf that exists between them, and those for whom the NSPCC is building a therapeutic centre at Basford.

And now in a bold, even experimental, attempt to start bridging that gulf, as well as indicating to the outside world that this is not a forgotten place, there is to be a literary festival in Stoke : the first one ever. It is called Hot Air. It will happen from 20-22 June, in a marquee erected in the courtyard of the Emma Bridgewater factory, where the dray horses used to clatter in over the cobbles, and the buildings still have buffer stones at the corners to stop turning carts knocking out the brickwork. And this, as befits Stoke's uniquely busy past and pitifully idle present, is no ordinary literary festival.

Those of us who have done the literary festival rounds for decades have grown weary of the way that celebrity, in all its strange modern forms, seems to have taken the place of reading and writing on the now ubiquitous festival circuit. You can't blame the audience for wanting to come and have a good gawp at someone who has made a name for themselves in public or cultural or even internet life, but writers are not in any way trained performers, whatever they are obliged to do by way of promotion for their publishers, and in any case the ones I know have an overriding faith in the power of words and reading as not just a force for good, but as a vital ingredient in a satisfying life. Nobody I saw on the estates in Stoke looked remotely satisfied about anything. If those three-year-olds are never read to, it is more than probable that nobody in their households ever reads anything. Or, indeed, can.

So, the organisers of this festival are not primarily concerned with garnering large audiences who have come to see whether Lynn Barber ever looked like Carey Mulligan. They are instead doing this for Stoke, for the people of Stoke, especially for the people who are alarmed by books and reading, who never think of entering a library, people who feel, dispiritedly, that education is not for them, or it's too late to bother, or that a screen will somehow distract them from the yawning hollowness of having no purpose and not even basic skills to acquire one.

To this end, the tickets are, by usual lit fest standards, cheap at no more than £6. There are free tickets for teachers and lots of tickets to be won, especially for children's events. There is an energetic writing competition – Too Write – which is open to all ages and whose aim is to encourage people to believe that storytelling – or, more broadly, the exercise of the imagination – is available to everyone. The lineup of writers who are coming is impressive, but that is because those writers are keen to come to a festival that is actually about reading and writing, and talk to audiences who are there for the books, and the possibilities they offer, and not primarily to observe how much the authors differ from their publicity photographs in the flesh.

So, the patron of the festival is Andy McNab, who is also the opening event. Then there will be Emma Bridgewater herself, Anthony Beevor, David Starkey, Lauren Childs, Stoke's own Mel Sherratt, and me. There will be teachers and librarians and schoolchildren and, we all hope, lots of families, and bits of families, and people who either know, or will discover, what extraordinary friends books can be.

No mere literary festival can sort the situation. Three days of book handling and book talk and general book obsession isn't going to solve the problems of a place where industry and busyness has been replaced by aimlessness and its deadening effects. But it's a start. A brave start on a human, and therefore promising, scale. Arnold Bennett would have applauded it. And so, I think, would Stanley Matthews.

Balancing Act by Joanna Trollope is published by Doubleday. All proceeds from this article are being donated to the NSPCC in Stoke.