You Will Be Safe Here is the powerful debut novel by Damian Barr, which The Guardian, Observer and Financial Times have included in their Books to Watch 2019. Set in South Africa, it uncovers the hidden history of the British concentration camps of the Boer War and links it to a present-day secret. Damian talks […]

Tipped as ‘One to Watch in 2019’ by The Observer and Stylist, Hanna Jameson’s thriller, The Last, is one we guarantee you won’t be able to put down. She was inspired to write the book partly by the non-stop discussion of nuclear war since Trump’s election and was also influenced by growing up into 9/11 […]

An award-winning writer in several genres, a teacher and a journalist, Kate joins Patrick Gale to discuss England: Poems from a School – an anthology of poems by her students at Oxford Spires Academy – and her new book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, praised by Philip Pullman as “The best […]

Author Sue Ellery-Hill’s other claim to fame is that she is the daughter of Brenda Wootton: the ‘Voice of Cornwall’. She talks to Mike Sagar-Fenton about how she came tell to her mother’s story in Brenda – For the Love of Cornwall. Despite her large size, her past-middle-age and her quiet village upbringing in the […]

When does a protest movement become a rebellion? How does it feel to leave your home for unknown territory? What happens when you have to rely on the kindness of strangers? This performance, featuring aptly-named musicians ‘An Gof ’ (the term used to describe a Cornish patriot), tells in verse the story of the Cornish people’s march to London in 1497, to present […]

Don’t be put off by the fact that Joanna Verran is Emeritus Professor of Microbiology at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has a passion for using arts and the humanities to help audiences engage with science. The Bad Bugs Bookclub gets scientists and non-scientists reading fiction that features infection and contagion – and that means vampires […]

Jane Corry tells the story behind her gripping new thriller, I Looked Away. The Sunday Times bestselling author of My Husband’s Wife and The Dead Ex will also give her ten top tips to help you succeed with writing your own bestselling novel. Jane’s experience as writer in residence for a high-security male prison helped […]

The border between children’s and grownups’ literature is fluid. A good story works for all readers – children have as much need to explore themes of life and the meaning of the world as older readers. Petrus Ursem reveals how the Cornish landscape released his love of writing, weaving past mysteries into heart-beating new adventures, […]

Faced with a personal housing crisis – part of a country-wide system of inequality – Catrina Davies took the radical decision to make a dilapidated shed into a home of her own, as told in her latest book, Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed. She talks – and sings – about how simplicity can […]

The distinguished novelist Alan Hollinghurst discusses his life and work with the LitFest’s Rachel Viney. Alan is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Somerset Maugham Award (The Swimming-Pool Library), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (The Folding Star) and the Man Booker Prize (The Line of Beauty). His most recent novel, The Sparsholt Affair, […]

For many years, award-winning crime writer John Harvey lived in Zennor and remains a frequent visitor to the Cornish coast. In Body and Soul – the final novel of his career and the last case for his Cornwall detective Frank Elder – John explores the beautifully drawn borderlines between father and daughter, city and country […]

In King of Dust, Alex Woodcock explores the Romanesque sculpture of the south-west that inspired him to become a cathedral stonemason. Weaving together his own story of learning to work stone with the potency of the stone carvings and stories of their medieval carvers, his book is a meditation on craft, the importance of the […]