The American stand-up first made her mark on the UK comedy circuit through her nomination for best newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe with her debut show For Worse. In between her podcast work on They Like To Watch, Sara continues to perform stand-up, packed with jokes and delivered at a chaotic, often break-neck pace.
‘Barron is not afraid to go near the knuckle, so strap in if you’re faint of heart.’ ★★★★ The Wee Review
Comedy was built into Patrick from a young age, reaching the finals of So You Think You’re Funny? and the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year competitions while still a teenager. His approach to comedy is often self-deprecating, but his confidence lies in his sharp wit that is projected through big laughs.
‘Cutting a relaxed figure on-stage, he always has a small smile across his face as the audience laugh at almost everything’ Wee Review
Compering on Friday afternoon, the Cornish stand-up, actor and writer who garnered rave reviews for her recent hour Crying in TK Maxx. The show saw her appraise the men in her life after she discovered footage of her estranged father in a scandalous Channel 4 documentary. Riotously funny and engaging.
‘Every joke lands flawlessly, and her bubbly persona shines.’ ★★★★★ Lost in Theatreland
Charismatic, no-nonsense and extremely funny, Thanyia has been making waves on the UK comedy circuit after winning the Funny Women contest in 2018. Her stand-up touches on her personal experiences, punctuated by a big and commanding personality. As an actor, she’s appeared in Katherine Ryan’s Duchess on Netflix and the BAFTA-winning Alma’s Not Normal.
“Moore has a gift for making people laugh.” ★★★★ The Skinny”
Richard King will be returning to the festival to discuss his incredible new book Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell a Life published earlier this year by Faber. It is the result of extensive research that saw Richard curating the ephemera and documentation found in both Arthur’s and other private archives, and consists of hand-written scores, lyrics, photos, letters and drawings. Throughout, King has conducted wide-ranging original interviews with Arthur’s collaborators, contemporaries, family and friends. The resulting book reveals a true picture of one of the most distinctive artists of the last fifty years. RICHARD KING is the author of Original Rockers (shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and a Rough Trade, Times and Uncut Book of the Year),How Soon Is Now? (a Sunday Times Music Book of the Year), The Lark Ascending (a Rough Trade, MOJO and Evening Standard Book of the Year, shortlisted for the Penderyn Prize) and, most recently, Brittle with Relics, all published by Faber& Faber. He is the current Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media & Culture.
What is home? It’s a question that has troubled Marchelle Farrell for her entire life. Years ago she left Trinidad and now, uprooted once again, she heads to the peaceful English countryside – the only Black woman in her village. Drawn to her new garden, Marchelle begins to examine the complex and emotional question of home in the context of colonialism. As her relationship with the garden deepens, she discovers that her two conflicting identities are far more intertwined than she had realised. Full of hope and healing, Uprooting is a book about finding home where we least expect it, and which invites us to reconnect to the land – and ourselves.
Marchelle Farrell is a therapist, writer and amateur gardener. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, she has spent the last twenty years attempting to become hardy in the UK. She has trained and worked as a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist. When not neglecting it for the care of her young children, or her work in the community, Marchelle spends much of her time getting to know her country garden in Somerset and writing about the things the garden teaches her about herself. Her debut Uprooting won the Nan Shepherd Prize.
Legendary producer and record label boss Joe Boyd has spent a lifetime travelling the globe and immersing himself in music. He has witnessed first-hand the growing popularity of music from Africa, India, Latin America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe since the 1960s and was one of the protagonists of the ‘world music’ movement of the 1980s. He will be joining us to discuss his new book And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music where he sets out to explore the fascinating backstories behind these sounds and this sweeping history documents a decade of encounters with the most extraordinary musicians and producers who have altered the course of music for us all. The resulting book shows how personalities, events and politics in places such as Havana, Lagos, Budapest, Kingston and Rio are as colourful and momentous as anything that took place in New Orleans, Harlem, Laurel Canyon or Liverpool. And, moreover, how jazz, rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll would never have happened if it weren’t for the notes and rhythms emanating from over the horizon.
Joe Boyd is the legendary producer of Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, R.E.M., Fairport Convention, ¡Cubanismo!, Toots and the Maytals, Toumani Diabaté, Taj Mahal and numerous others. He founded and ran the Hannibal label for twenty years. His film productions include ‘Jimi Hendrix’ and Aretha Franklin’s ‘Amazing Grace’. His memoir, White Bicyles: Making Music in the 1960s, was published in 2006 to wide critical-acclaim.
Lucy Jones will be joining us to discuss her acclaimed new book Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood. During pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis. There is no other time in a human’s life course that entails such dramatic change-other than adolescence. And yet this life-altering transition has been sorely neglected by science, medicine and philosophy. Its seismic effects go largely unrepresented across literature and the arts. In this ground-breaking, deeply personal investigation, acclaimed journalist and author Lucy Jones brings to light the emerging concept of ‘matrescence’. Drawing on new research across various fields – neuroscience and evolutionary biology; psychoanalysis and existential therapy; sociology, economics and ecology – Jones shows how the changes in the maternal mind, brain and body are far more profound, wild and enduring than we have been led to believe.
Lucy Jones is the prize-winning author of Losing Eden and Foxes Unearthed. Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love & Loathing in Modern Britain, was published by Elliott & Thompson in 2016. It was long-listed for the Wainwright Prize and won the Society of Authors’ Roger Deakin Award. Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need The Wild was published in March 2020 by Allen Lane (Penguin). Losing Eden was long-listed for the Wainwright Prize and received a Society of Authors’ K Blundell Trust Award. Lucy is a freelance journalist and writes widely for newspapers and magazines.
In May 2022, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science released a paper that measured fourteen European countries on three factors: biodiversity, wellbeing, and nature connectedness. Britain came last in every single category. The findings are clear: we are suffering – and nature is too.
Enter ‘Wild Service’ – a visionary concept crafted by the pioneers of the Right to Roam campaign, which argues that humanity’s loss and nature’s need are two sides of the same story. Blending science, nature writing and indigenous philosophy, this groundbreaking book calls for mass reconnection to the land and a commitment to its restoration.
We are delighted to be joined by the book’s co-editor Jon Moses as we discuss Britain’s new nature defenders: an anarchic cast of guerilla guardians who neither own the places they protect, nor the permission to restore them. Still, they’re doing it anyway. This book is a celebration of their spirit and a call for you to join. So, whether you live in the countryside or the city, want to protect your local river or save our native flora, this is your invitation to rediscover the power in participation – the sacred in the service.
Jon Moses has been a serial trespasser all his life, but since 2021 he’s gone professional. A writer and campaigner, he joined Right to Roam after completing a PhD in Geohumanities at the University of London and has been helping ordinary people breach the fences which exclude them ever since. He’s written profiles, essays, opinion and features for Bloomberg, the Guardian, The Great Outdoors and The Lead
Noreen Masud will be joining us to discuss A Flat Place her acclaimed memoir, published earlier this year and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024. She suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain’s flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life.
Noreen’s British-Pakistani heritage makes her a partial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised, inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy of pastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature’s power to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories that resist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across the flat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of the land beneath her feet
Noreen is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker 2020. Her books are Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language (Oxford University Press, 2022), which won the MSA First Book Prize 2023, and A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin], 2023), which has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024 and Jhalak Prize 2024, and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award.