Reading the Land 2026
We're delighted to once more be holding the Book Festival at the Grosvenor Arms in the heart of Shaftesbury. We're welcoming an amazing lineup of authors whose work focuses on the natural world, from nature rights to folklore – and much more in between.
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TICKETS GO ON SALE SATURDAY 7 FEBRUARY, 10AM
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Friday 20 March
Welcome to our weekend of insightful conversation, discussion and learning. Over the next couple of days, we'll hear from those who capture readers' hearts and minds across a wide variety of topics. We hope you'll come away from the weekend informed and invigorated.
18.15-19.15
Jay Griffiths (How Animals Heal Us)
​This book uses history, science and Indigenous understanding to demonstrate how animals heal us, from the medicinal qualities of birdsong, the ability of animals to smell cancer, assuage loneliness and act as therapists for the hurt psyche.
In this original, revelatory and exuberant book, Jay Griffiths explores how animals can have a role in every level of healing, from the individual to the collective, guiding us in how we might create societies that are healthier, fairer and kinder. How Animals Heal Us puts animals at the heart of a restorative vision of health.
Introduced by Sue Clifford
Saturday 21 March
10.00-11.15
In conversation:
Paul Lamb (Of Thorn & Briar) and Ben Short (Burn)
Of Thorn & Briar by Paul Lamb is a quietly powerful memoir that follows a year in the life of a West Country hedgelayer as he travels the south‑west of England restoring ancient hedgerows by hand. Woven around the rhythm of the seasons, the book celebrates the craft of hedgelaying, the hidden richness of these “linear woodlands,” and a way of living close to the land that feels both timeless and urgently needed.
Burn by Ben Short is a raw and beautifully written memoir about leaving a high‑pressure advertising career in London for a life of charcoal‑burning and woodland craft in rural England. Framed as a story of fire, woods, and healing, it explores anxiety, depression, and recovery through manual labour, ancient skills, and deep immersion in the natural world.​
Chaired by Jeni Bell
11.45-13.15
In conversation:
Lisa Schneidau (Woodland / River / Botanical Folk Tales) and Martin Maudsley (Telling the Seasons)​
Lisa Schneidau’s books are collections of traditional folk tales from Britain and Ireland, reframed for modern readers with a strong focus on nature and place. Her best‑known titles – Botanical Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland, Woodland Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland, River Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland, and English Folk Tales of Coast and Sea – gather stories about plants, forests, rivers, and the sea, linking old legends to contemporary environmental awareness.
Telling the Seasons takes us on a journey through the twelve months of the year with stories, customs and celebrations. Drawing on the changing patterns of nature and the rich tapestry of folklore from the British Isles, it is a colourful guide into how and why we continue to celebrate the seasons. Here are magical myths of the sun and moon, earthy tales of walking stones and talking trees and lively legends of the spirits of each season.
Chaired by Angela McAllister
14.45-15.45
Michael J. Warren (The Cuckoo's Lea)
The Cuckoo's Lea is about the power and allure of place in our lives, now and in the long past, as shaped and evoked by birds. Michael J. Warren goes in search of the many birds hidden in English place-names, names which take us back to a medieval world when the towns and villages in which we still live today were first coming into being. Their names are not only ancient, but reveal the intimate and local relationships that people once had with their homes and environments – relationships in which birds played a vital role.
Introduced by Catherine Simmonds
16.30-17.30
Guy Shrubsole (The Lie of the Land)
The lie of the land: that Britain’s landowners care for the countryside. Our landowning elite are paid billions of taxpayer pounds to be good stewards. But these same landowners have carelessly trampled over our best-loved landscapes, leaving the rivers polluted, fenlands drained, and moorlands burned.
Guy Shrubsole has travelled across Britain to expose the lie and meet the communities fighting back to restore our lost landscapes. This is a bold, shared vision for our nation’s wild places, and how we can treat them with the awe and care they deserve.
Introduced by Karen Brazier
18.15-19.15
Lucy Lapwing (Love is a Toad)
Nature makes us feel things. It sparks awe, curiosity and a sense of beauty and community. But as wildlife around us declines and disappears, murkier feelings rise up: guilt, detachment and fear for nature's plight. For many years, Lucy Lapwing wrestled with these tangled emotions. So, in an attempt to make sense of this dance between joy and grief, she decided to go on a journey. In Love Is a Toad, Lucy traverses meadows, bogs and hedgerows with her fellow nature enthusiasts, where she digs down into our relationship with the natural world.
Over the course of a year, she meets bucketfuls of wildlife – Blackbird and Oak, slugs and puffballs, waterlilies, Dung Beetles and toads – as she roams across the UK. From a river swim to wanders through woodlands, with every journey, Lucy explores how nature makes us feel, from wild grief and anger through to soaring joy and indefatigable hope. At once a celebration and an invitation to reflect, Love Is a Toad prods and pokes at our connection to the natural world, exploring its complexity in all its muddiness, messiness and wonder. ​
Introduced by Brigit Strawbridge-Howard
Sunday 22 March
10-11am
Monica Feria-Tinta (Barrister for the Earth)
​Can a planet have legal rights? Could it be defended in a court of law? How do we redefine a ‘right to life’? A revolution is taking place. Around the world, ordinary people are turning to courts, seeking justice for environmental wrongs and nature protection: rivers, forests, endangered species.
Monica Feria-Tinta, barrister and author of A Barrister for the Earth, explores these ideas in this talk. Join the discussion on novel efforts to protect the Earth and the diversity of life.
Introduced by Keggie Carew
11.45-12.45
In conversation
Nicola Chester (Ghosts of the Farm) and Sarah Lonsdale (Wildly Different: Five Women Who Reclaimed Nature in a Man's World)​
Ghosts of the Farm is the story of Miss White, a woman who lived in the author’s village 80 years ago, a pioneer who realised her ambition to become a farmer during the Second World War, and how she worked to become accepted within this community. Nicola Chester, too, dreamed of becoming a farmer but working with horses was the only path open to her. Was it easier for women to become farmers in the 1940s than it is now? Moving between Nicola’s own attempts to work outdoors and Miss White’s desire to farm a generation earlier, Nicola explores the parallels between their lives – and the differences.
In Wildly different, historian Sarah Lonsdale traces the lives of five women who fought for the right to work in, enjoy and help to save the earth’s wild places. For millennia the ‘wild’ was a place heroic men went on epic quests. Women were prevented from joining them, either through physical control or powerful myths about what would happen if they ventured beyond the city wall or village boundary. So how did women claim their place in the remote and lovely parts of our planet?
14.00-15.00
Anjana Khatwa (Whispers of Rock)
If you listen, can you hear the rocks speak? The question seems absurd. After all, rocks are lifeless, inert, and silent. In The Whispers of Rock: Stories from the Earth, earth scientist Anjana Khatwa will ask us to think again and listen to their stories. Boldly alternating between modern science and ancient wisdom, Anjana will take you on an exhilarating journey through deep time, from origins of the green pounamu that courses down New Zealand rivers to the wonder of the megaliths of Stonehenge, from the fiery volcanoes of Hawai’i to a meteorite regarded as an ancestor for First Nations in Oregon.
In unearthing those stories and more, Anjana will show how rocks have always spoken to us, and we humans to them. Delicately intertwining Indigenous stories of Earth’s creation with our scientific understanding of its development, she will showcase how our lives are intimately connected to time’s ancient storytellers. ​
Introduced by Amber Harrison
15.45-16.45
Michael Malay (Late Light)
​Late Light is the story of Michael Malay's own journey, an Indonesian Australian making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety.
It is about the wonder these animals inspired in our ancestors, the hope they inspire in us, and the joy they might still hold for our children. Late Light is about migration, belonging and extinction. Through the close examination of four particular 'unloved' animals - eels, moths, crickets and mussels - Michael Malay tells the story of the economic, political and cultural events that have shaped the modern landscape of Britain.
In conversation with Jeni Bell
17.30-18.30
Helen Scales (What the Wild Sea Can Be)
In What the Wild Sea Can Be, Helen Scales observes in her bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of the ocean. Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Scales links past to present to show how prehistoric ocean ecology holds lessons for the ocean of today. In elegant, evocative prose, she takes us into the realms of animals that epitomize current increasingly challenging conditions, from emperor penguins to sharks and orcas.
Yet despite these threats, many hopeful signs remain, in the form of highly protected reserves, the regeneration of seagrass meadows and giant kelp forests and efforts to protect coral reefs. Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the ocean.
In conversation with Keggie Carew