What’s On
We are delighted to be back for a second Redruth Book Festival, building on the foundations we laid last April. This year our festival has grown to include a Childrens Festival, which will take place on Friday and Saturday at the Library, and the main festival will start with a magical evening of folklore and feminism with a Literary Salon hosted by Scary Little Girls. The weekend is packed with a literary and culinary feast – with writers discussing our theme of the land and our connection to it – from growing our food, to walking the coast path and designing beautiful gardens. We’ll have a panel discussion about the unique geology of Cornwall underneath our feet led by our headline sponsor Cornish Lithium, and of course, there will be plenty of delicious food to feast on!
Location:
Redruth Drapery, West End, Redruth TR15 2RZ
Dates:
Friday 19th-Sunday 21st April 2024
Friday
Lucy started her career as a bookseller at Waterstones, before coming a full-time writer. She lives in Devon where she has written 5 novels, including The Times bestselling Sistersong, which was a finalist for the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2022. Her latest historical fantasy novel, Song of the Huntress, is published this year. She has also written the Worldmaker Trilogy under the name Lucy Hounsom, and she co-hosts Breaking the Glass Slipper, an award winning feminist podcast. Lucy will be in conversation with Becca Mordan.
Scary Little Girls is a vibrant, hard-working production hub run by Artistic Director Rebecca Mordan, whose commitment and passion for theatrical and artistic storytelling is borne out by the variety of scary little work they have created and the support they have from their scary little artists and audiences.
Saturday
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.
Sunday
Sophie Pierce is a writer with a passionate interest in our emotional connection to natural landscapes. In 2017, her life changed forever when her 20-year-old son Felix died suddenly and unexpectedly. Thrown into a new world of loss, she had to find a way to keep on living. Her memoir, The Green Hill: Letters to a Son is a series of letters to Felix – which she composed during walks and swims taken close to his grave on the Green Hill by the River Dart in Devon. The book celebrates the natural landscape and the role it plays in our lives and relationships, as well as looking at how we consider our own mortality. Sophie is also the co-author of four wild swimming guides with a fourth, Wild Swimming Walks Exmoor and North Devon, coming out in April. Until 2020 she was a radio and TV reporter for BBC Southwest, and had a varied career spanning over 20 years, covering stories on everything from natural disasters through to political scandals and skateboarding ducks. Sophie will be talking to Sarah Connors.
Tim Hubbard is well known in Cornwall as a familiar voice at BBC Radio Cornwall. He joined the station in 1983 after a career as an English and Drama teacher, and became a journalist, producer, editor and a popular presenter there for many years, winning several major national accolades including two Sony/Radio Academy Gold Awards. Tim went on to coach journalism and presentation skills for the BBC across the UK and in Europe and became an Associate Lecturer in Journalism and Media at Falmouth University. He has written features and articles for national newspapers and magazines including Country Living, Gardeners’ World, The Express on Sunday, Escape Routes and The Sunday Times. His first book A Year in Cornwall with Tim Hubbard was published in 2000. Tim will be talking about his latest book, Secret Gardens of Cornwall published last year, where he takes us to gardens in Cornwall, which are not regularly open to the public. He hopes to be in conversation with the Head Gardener of one the Secret Gardens featured in the book. We would like to tell you who but if we did, it would no longer be a secret!
This year, Redruth Book Festival is closing with a panel discussion exploring the impact of Cornwall’s unique identity and landscape on its past, present and future. This promises to be a lively debate/question and answer session, and is chaired by Julian German.