Saturday
Experience the essence of Redruth Book Feast 2024, where nationally renowned writers with local ties converge. Your Saturday pass grants you entry to all writers’ talks and the interactive Saturday Brunch. Separate tickets are required for the Saturday dinner featuring Keynote Speaker Bill Buckley. Opt for a discounted weekend pass for full access to talks (excludes Saturday’s dinner and the Friday evening talks). Refreshments, including lunch options and hot drinks, will be available for purchase both days, with a licensed bar on site.
Full festival passes are also available, as are individual event tickets.
Join us for Brunch, tucking into breakfast in a bap, while you enjoy an informed debate about food and food production, with our guest panel (Fliss Freeborn, Graham Harvey & The Bearded Farmers), chaired by Orlando Murrin.
Sasha Swire grew up in west Cornwall, where her father, Sir John Nott, was MP for the St Ives constituency. She was a journalist on national and regional publications and in Asia before working as her MP husband Hugo Swire’s political researcher from 2001 to 2019. To escape the confines of Westminster, she used to walk the northern stretch of the Southwest Coast Path. Starting in Minehead, she followed the well-trodden path to Land’s End, returning each year to walk it in sections over a decade-long period. The result, her first book, Edgeland, (published last year), is an immersive, beguiling, and literary exploration of one of the most enigmatic, beautiful and popular coastlines on earth. It is also a contemplative and very personal response to a story about our shore from pre-Celtic times to the present day. Sasha identifies how important edges are to us as she walks and discovers that the path is not only a walk through our windswept and wave-battered fringes but a tale about how we and nature have, through extraordinary resilience and relentless spirit, learnt to tame the various forces that are stacked against us. Sasha will be in conversation with Tim Hannigan.
Jodie Matthews grew up in Bodmin, studied at Falmouth University and now lives in Manchester. A poet and writer, Meet Me At The Surface is her first novel – a page-turning, horror-tinged mystery and moving tale of love and loss set on the windswept Cornish moors. It was shortlisted for the Bath Novel Award and the Blue Pencil First Novel Award 2021. Jodie has been gathering an increasing number of followers during her recent trips to Cornwall and beyond and we predict great things for her. Jodie will be in conversation with Emily Barr.
Orlando Murrin, acclaimed chef, and author, takes the helm as the chair of our eagerly anticipated Saturday Brunch Session, delving into the realm of sustainable food. Later in the day, we’ll have the pleasure of witnessing Orlando in conversation with Tim Hubbard, as they explore Orlando’s first novel, a culinary crime story called Knife Skills For Beginners. After being catapulted into the culinary limelight as a semi-finalist on MasterChef, Orlando Murrin edited Woman and Home, BBC Good Food and founded Olive magazine; then he switched track to become a chef-hotelier in SW France and Somerset. He has written six cookbooks and is President of the Guild of Food Writers. An ever-popular guest on TV and radio, he presents the BBC Good Food Podcast with Tom Kerridge. From his grandfather, a Met detective who rose to become a crack MI5 interrogator, he inherited a fascination with crime and mystery. And so, the idea for Knife Skills For Beginners was born. Join us for a day filled with culinary enlightenment and engaging discourse with Orlando Murrin. Orlando will be chairing our Brunch panel on Saturday morning, and then returning to talk about his books with Tim Hubbard in the afternoon.
Bill Buckley is a lifelong lover of reading and writing and trained and qualified as a newspaper journalist with The Midland News Association before presenting That’s Life! – the BBC’s legendary TV consumer affairs programme with Esther Rantzen in the 1980s. Bill was a reporter for the BBC’s Holiday Programme for six globetrotting years and was weekday evenings continuity announcer for Channel 5 Television during its first six and a half years. He is a food writer, critic, and judge. He is a member of the Guild of Food Writers and a judge/coordinator for The Great Taste Awards and The Academy of Chocolate. He has cooked live on TV and at several food festivals. He writes music as well as words – he wrote Su Pollard’s number two UK hit single in 1987, Starting Together. In September 2005, Bill won Channel 4’s Come Dine with Me. He previously cooked on the Carlton Food Network and, live, on Channel 5 on Open House with Gloria Hunniford. Bill has also appeared as a judge on three series of ITV1’s Britain’s Best Dish and UKTV Food’s The People’s Cookbook with Antony Worrall Thompson and Paul Rankin. He has been food editor of BBC Southern Counties magazine and was elected to the prestigious Guild of Food Writers. A veteran of Guildford and Henley’s Book Festivals, we are thrilled that is he is adding Redruth’s to that list.
