17/11/2021 - 21/11/2021
Experience this years winter literary festival from anywhere in the world, from the very comfort of your home. Running from the 17th-21st November.
Dame Gillian Beer: 6:30 pm, 17/11/21.
This time with her own new short memoir, Stations Without Signs, Professor Dame Gillian Beer returns to the festival.
Academic Gillian Beer decided to write a few fragments reflecting on her youth, just days after her eighty-sixth birthday. As a result, came Stations Without Signs, an intimate and full memoir spanning her childhood experiences as an evacuee during World War II right through to almost the present day.
Writer and broadcaster Alex Clark will be joining Gillian to talk on her book, casting light into the time and tides of her remarkable life and career.
Peter Stott: 7:30pm, 18/11/21.
Ours is the age of global warming; rising sea levels, extreme weather, forest fires. Dire warnings are everywhere, so why has it taken so long for the crisis to be recognised?
In his book Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial climate scientist Peter Stott exposes the shocking truth. Fresh from his attendance at COP26, Peter reveals the bitter fight to gain international recognition for what, among scientists, has been known for decades: human activity causes climate change.
Across continents and against the efforts of sceptical governments, prominent climate change deniers and shadowy lobbyists, Hot Air is the urgent story of how the science was developed, how it has been repeatedly sabotaged, and why humanity hasn’t a second to spare in the fight to halt climate change.
In conversation with Philippa Nuttall, editor in chief for environment and sustainability at the New Statesman.
Merlin Sheldrake: 6:30pm, 19/11/21.
There is a lifeform so strange and wondrous that it forces us to rethink how life works…. the spectacular and neglected world of fungi.
Stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence’, neither plant nor animal, fungi can solve problems without a brain,
Providing us with bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, they have shaped human history.
Merlin Sheldrake’s prize-winning Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures sheds light on this miraculous world, and how it transforms the way we understand ecosystems.
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is winner of the 2021 Wainwright Prize for Global Conservation and Climate Change
Join Merlin and multi award-winning nature writer and academic, Robert Macfarlane, to hear about this extraordinary first book.
Joan Bakewell, 11am, 21/11/21.
‘Old age is no longer a blip in the calendar, just a few declining years before the end. Old age is now a major and important part of life’ – Joan Bakewell.
When Joan Bakewell, Labour Peer, author, and famous champion of the older people’s right to a full and fruitful life, decided that she could no longer remain in her old home, she had to confront what she calls ‘the next segment of life.’
Illuminating her own experience, Joan Bakewell will tell us a story of our times and how she is learning to live to the sound and tune of The Tick of Two Clocks: both the old and the new.
Joan Bakewell will be in conversation with Kate Mosse, Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Claudia Rankine & Natasha Brown, 6:30pm, 21/11/21.
Debut novelist Natasha Brown joins poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine, whose multidisciplinary work on racial justice is directly echoed in Brown’s first novel, Assembly.
Rankine’s latest book, Just Us, embodies an invitation to discover what it takes to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that surround whiteness.
Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as her guiding light, Rankine explores a series of real encounters and clashes with friends and strangers in familiar spaces: the airport, the theatre, the dinner party and the voting booth.
Find out the ways in which these two texts speak to one another as Rankine and Brown meet in this exclusive event, chaired by writer and broadcaster Alex Clark.
Access all 18 events for just £25, with the option to watch back for 7 days afterwards.
More details of the line-up and times can be found at their website.