Author Event
Bookings are now live for Tetbury Book Festival ’24.
Friday 13th to Sunday 15th September, with a bonus event on Wednesday 18th.
Stories, history, music, poetry, nature, craft and more.
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Meg is one of the most innovative and challenging authors working in young adult fiction today. The award winning author of How I Live Now, What I Was, The Great Godden, and Friends Like These, Meg has written compelling stories that cross genres and boundaries, with vital and unforgettable characters. Her focus on narrative and empathy with her characters means that her books are subtle and beautiful – an unusual quality in writing for young adults. Her heroes are ordinary people dealing with extraordinary situations and the choices they make.
Meg will be in conversation about her stunning new book, Almost Nothing Happened, with Tiffany Murray, author of YA classic Diamond Star Halo and this year’s My Family and Other Rock Stars. They will discuss why writing for teenagers is so important, and how it has the capacity to change lives.
This event would be great for young adults, teachers, parents, and anyone who writes, as well as a more general audience.
£8.50
Richard Fortey is the UK’s foremost palaeontologist. He enjoyed a long career at the Natural History Museum, as well as being a professor at the universities of both Oxford and Bristol. He has published more than 250 research papers and appeared on numerous TV and radio programmes.
Richard has spent much of his lifetime searching for rare and extraordinary fungi, in a quest to understand the importance of ‘the forgotten kingdom’ in the web of nature. He takes us on his journey to meet luminous brackets, stinkhorns and stranglers, and many other bizarre and wonderful mushrooms and toadstools, ranging from the ugliest and strangest species to the beautiful silky rosegill. This is a celebration of fungi in all their different roles – both in the natural world and in our own lives.
£8.50
Activism often conjures up quick, reactive, transactional signing of petitions, clicktivism, loud and aggressive ways to demand justice. There is a need for these types of activism. There is also a need for slower, quieter and more gentle forms of protest.
Sarah Corbett, founder of the global Craftivist Collective will host a craftivism (craft + activism) workshop offering the opportunity to ‘slow down and stitch’, completing a tangible craftivism project to take home to keep as a form of ‘Gentle Protest’.
Join this hopeful workshop providing a safe space with soothing smells, sounds and create a physical tool to encourage you to be the best global citizen you can be each day and how to be a gentle protester.
Stitch by therapeutic stitch, as you reveal the face of your chosen changemaker on a beautifully made letterpress printed card to keep: Reflect on the values threaded through them and their lives to help you reflect on how you can be part of the positive change you wish to see in our messy world. End with making a small papercraft craftivism project to send out out into the world to support the Fashion Revolution.
Limited to 15 adults per workshop. All craft resources supplied and ethically sourced.
Eleanor Barraclough is a historian, writer and broadcaster, and the author of Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. Now based at Bath Spa University, she has previously held positions at the universities of Oxford and Durham. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a BBC New Generation Thinker.
Introducing her new book, Embers of the Hands, is the story of all the Viking people who don’t fit the warrior stereotype – children, enslaved people, seers, artisans, travellers, and writers – but who shared their world nonetheless.
Drawn from the literature, history and archaeology of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Greenland, the British Isles, Continental Europe and Russia, this is a history of a Viking Age filled with real people of different ages, classes, ethnicities, sexualities, and abilities as told through the traces that they left behind, from hairstyles, place names and love-notes to musical instruments and children’s toys.
Eleanor uncovers hidden histories and illuminates a world beyond the usual tales of raiders, traders and rulers – building up a fresh understanding of what it meant to live through those times, away from the grand narrative sweep of history.
Eleanor will be in conversation with Dr Hattie Soper, who teaches Medieval Literature at Bristol University, and has published on Old Norse writing.
Sarah founded the global Craftivist Collective in 2009. Corbett calls her unique methodology ‘Gentle Protest’ and her work has helped change hearts, minds, policies and laws around the world. She has co-written several books, including this year’s Craftivist Collective Handbook. In conversation with Katy Bevan, she will talk about her new book and the art of ‘gentle protest’ – how craftivism can be a transformational tool for personal wellbeing and community cohesion.
Making something with your own hands is a reflective process, encouraging you to slow down when the pace of life feels too fast: there is a joy in creating something that is unique, tangible evidence of your time and labour.
Sarah P Corbett is an activist, author and Ashoka Fellow. Born in Everton, the fourth most deprived ward in the UK, she worked at Oxfam GB before founding the global Craftivist Collective in 2009. Corbett calls her unique methodology ‘Gentle Protest’ and her work has helped change hearts, minds, policies and laws around the world. Collaborations include Save the Children, The Climate Coalition, Fashion Revolution, Tate, V&A, Helsinki Design Week and Secret Cinema amongst others.
Katy is a Trustee of Heritage Crafts and publisher at Quickthorn Books. Quickthorn publish craft books with an emphasis on making, and personal agency: making empowers us to be more self-sufficient and take control over the way we consume.
In March 2020, Ben’s father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was never happier than when outdoors, and spent his free time chasing butterflies. Despite his attempts to share this passion with his son, Ben had always been resistant. But as his father spent his final months confined to the house, unable for the first summer of his life to follow the butterfly cycle, Ben became his connection to the outside world.
Blending memoir with nature writing, literary biography and pop-cultural history, this is an absorbing story of loss, grief and butterflies.
Ben is a lecturer in English at the University of Nottingham, and will be in conversation with Matthew Oates, the butterfly expert, naturalist, author and broadcaster.
The Bookshop Band play songs based on their own response to books they have read. Their new album, Emerge, features songs inspired by books by authors including Philip Pullman, Margaret Atwood, Shaun Bythell, Yann Martel, Robert Macfarlane, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Aldous Huxley and many others.
It was produced by Pete Townshend: “I am enchanted, such variation and delicacy… such latent power, really great work. It reminded me of my days listening to Sandy Denny and Fairport [Convention] and The Incredible String Band… – a great discovery and inspiration.”
Dan will be introducing his new book, ‘The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering’. Described as ‘a beautifully written and sure-footed history of mountaineering ‘before Everest’, full of wonderful stories and spanning continents and centuries’, he will take you on a panoramic journey through the history of mountaineering,
We meet devout Incan priests who, scaling the Andes’ icy slopes, Gurkha riflemen who canvassed the Karakoram, and the tweed-clad mountaineers who made the first serious assaults on Everest, hauling yards upon yards of battered rope through the ice, and many more. The White Ladder is an ode to mountains’ capacity to enthral, and the fundamental human drive to climb higher and higher.
Daniel will be in conversation with Kate Nicholson, climber and author of Behind Everest: Ruth Mallory’s Story.
Ben and Beth are not only brilliant song writers, they are talented musicians and enthusiastic communicators. They will guide you through their unique songwriting process, and help you make a start on a song of your own, inspired by a book you love.
No previous experience necessary, and open to all ages and abilities.
Poet, writer and academic Dai George will be introducing his new book about opening poetry up and making it accessible and understandable. Through short, biographical portraits, Dai provides an entertaining introduction to great works of poetry, and an inclusive guide to how we can read them.
His new book paints vivid pictures of a selection of poets throughout history: from Sappho, Li Bai and Rumi, to William Shakespeare and John Donne, Frank O’Hara, Pablo Neruda and Sylvia Plath. George thinks again about the canon, and champions major figures from other important cultures and communities, including China, India and the Caribbean.
Dai George is a poet, novelist and Lecturer in Creative Arts and Humanities at UCL. He will be in conversation with JLM Morton, herself a great advocate for the role of poetry in everyday life, teacher and poet.
Join us for a dazzling line-up of poets who will be reading and discussing their work. Email us an idea/theme, and one of our poets will write a poem on that theme that they will perform at the event (events@ylbooks.co.uk).
Martha Sprackland is a writer, editor and translator. Previously an editor for Faber and Unbound, her collection Citadel was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize. She is a tutor for Arvon and a mentor for the Women Poets’ Prize. She is translating the poems of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross for Penguin Classics.
Declan Ryan’s first collection, Crisis Actor, was published by Faber in 2023. His essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, including the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the Observer, the TLS, and Boxing News.
Chrissy Williams is a poet, editor and comic book writer. Her writing has been featured on BBC radio and television, and her full poetry collections are Bear and Low, both from Bloodaxe. She edits the poetry magazine Perverse.
Will Burns was a Faber New Poet in 2014 and his first full collection, Country Music, was published with Offord Road Books in 2020, and his debut novel, The Paper Lantern, was published in 2021, after which he was named one of the Observer’s Top 10 Debut Novelists of that year.
Rosanna’s new novel is one of the best books of the summer.
A Little Trickerie is based on the true story of the so-called Holy Maid of Leominster, a medieval con-woman who impersonates an angel and amasses a cult following.
The book is blazingly original, disarmingly funny and deeply moving. It portrays a side of Tudor England rarely seen, and is a tale of belief and superstition, kinship and courage, with a ragtag cast of characters and an unforgettable and distinctly unangelic heroine.
Rosanna will be in conversation with Dr Mark Hailwood (Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bristol), about her book, writing, and how women women can make their mark in a man’s world: how can fiction put women back in the centre of history?
Darren Freebury-Jones is one of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars. He made headlines earlier this year by revealing that in 1598 Shakespeare acted in Ben Jonson’s play ‘ Every Man in His Humour’, recycling and adapting some of the lines from that play in his own later work. Freebury-Jones specialises in Shakespearean linguistic analysis, but has published on other playwrights – Robert Greene and Thomas Kyd, amongst others.
Shakespeare was described by one rival who called him an ‘upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’. Now, over 400 years after his death, Shakespeare continues to ruffle feathers and delight audiences and readers.
In conversation with Jessica Chiba, Assistant Professor at the Shakespeare Institute, Darren will explore why Shakespeare still speaks to us today, the ways in which this actor-dramatist gives voice to so many different characters, and how he raises questions we’re still seeking to answer.
Returning for a second year, we’re very pleased to announce a re-run of our own fiendish quiz, raising money to help get books into the hands of children who really need them.
This year we’re inviting questions from friends and customers, with prizes for the best questions, and, of course, prizes for the winning team on the night.
This event is on the evening of Wednesday 18th September.
