Starting at: 11am - Nature's Calendar with coffee and cake. A close up look at nature through the 72 Japanese microseasons with refreshments on us. 1pm - Claire Ratinon: Unearthed - On race, roots and how the soil taught me to belong. 3pm We have poets! Four of the best writers (Martha Sprackland, Joey Connelly, Susannah Dickey and Kandace Siobhan Walker) read and discuss their work. 5pm - Joanna Quinn: The Whalebone Theatre - we explore the brilliant inter-war novel. 7pm - Big Book Quiz: An evening of booky fun, raising money for a local charity and prizes for everyone
Plus at 2pm : special Workshop run by acclaimed graphic novelist Joff Winterhart - Drawing your Story (to be held at The Market Hall in the centre of Tetbury Town)
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Joff Winterhart - Drawing your Story - A Workshop
This is a perfect creative activity for a Sunday afternoon. Joff is an illustrator, film-maker, drummer, as well as the Costa Award
shortlisted author of Days of the Bagnold Summer (a graphic novel about a mother and her heavy-metal loving son). Our workshop is for people who are interested in telling their own story, through words, pictures or images, but who don’t really know where to start. Bring along a favourite memory – a photo, picture, letter or memento, and develop your ideas.
You could end up with a drawing, a comic strip, an illustrated poem or simply some doodles on a page, but you will have had a great couple of hours, and, hopefully, be a little bit more confident about putting pencil to paper to express yourself.
Ticket: £20.00
Please Note: This event takes place in the centre of Tetbury in the Market Hall, GL8 8JG
Parking is available in the Chipping Car Park (behind the Snooty Fox Hotel) or in West Street - both are only a short walk away
11.00am Coffee and Cake with Rowan Jaines and Lulah Ellender: Nature’s Calendar – a close up look at nature through the 72 Japanese microseasons
How does our understanding of the seasons affect how we view nature and the environment? Nature’s Calendar is a book that
celebrates each small turn of the year by focusing on 72 five-day segments (an idea based on a Japanese ancient lunar calendar). Rowan and Lulah are part of the 4-woman team who began the Noticing Nature project online in 2021.
Nature’s Calendar opens our eyes to the sheer abundance and vitality of the natural world. It is an irrepressible and joyous celebration of the small and the local, and a genuine contribution to the question of how to preserve and protect these natural riches. As such, it is also a positive and enabling environmental call to arms.
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We’ll provide the coffee and the cake.
Rowan Jaines lectures in Human Environmental Geography at Sheffield University, and Lulah Ellender is an writer and gardener, whose latest book is Grounding: Finding Home in a Garden. They will be in conversation with Bristol University’s Ralph Pite, a Professor of English with a special interest in writing and the environment.
1pm Claire Ratinon: Unearthed - On race and roots, and how the soil taught me I belong.
Unearthed was one of Gardens Illustrated's books of the year when it came out in hardback last year. Now in paperback, we welcome Claire to Tetbury to talk about her 'outstanding work of storytelling and nature writing'.
Her writing has a wonderful empathy with the British countryside, which she describes beautifully. It is a privilege to share her pleasure in growing vegetables, but she also talks about how her own journey into growing food and gardening made her reflect on her identity. How did the colonial history of her homeland, Mauritius (where soil is more associated with colonialism and slavery), lead to her love of - and belonging to - her organic garden in East Sussex?
Claire has gardened in New York, London and points in between. She has supplied vegetables to restaurants such as Ottolenghi and Rovi, runs practical workshops, has spoken widely (from Tate Liverpool and Charleston to urban primary schools and community centres), and writes for a variety of magazines and newspapers.
She will be in conversation with Michael Malay, who lectures at Bristol University on poetry and environmental literature. His book 'Late Light' explores the migration of often ignored or uncared for species, and his own life as an Indonesian Australian making a home in England.
3pm Join poet and editor Martha Sprackland in hosting three of the UK's finest young poets. Joey Connolly, Susannah Dickey and Kandace Siobhan Walker will read from their brilliant, wide-ranging new books – out this year from Carcanet, Picador and CHEERIO Publishing – followed by a lively Q&A on poetry and creative writing.
Joey Connolly is the Director of the Faber Academy (the publisher's own creative writing school). In addition, he’s been a student and a teacher of creative writing, as well as a critic and a prize-winning author of three books.
Susannah Dickey is a poet and novelist from Derry. She is the author of two acclaimed novels: 'Tennis Lessons'
and 'Common Decency', and her debut poetry collection, ISDAL, is published in September by Picador. It has already been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Kandace Siobhan Walker is both a writer and artist. She was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2021, and won the White Review Poet’s Prize. Her pamphlet, Kaleido, was published by Bad 
Betty Press in 2022, and her first book, Cowboy, is published by CHEERIO in September 2023. It has also been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She lives in London, and is of of Canadian, Jamaican, Gullah-Geechee and Welsh heritage. She is an editor at bath magg.
Martha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator, and founder–editor of independent publisher Offord Road Books. Citadel (Pavilion Poetry, 2020) was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award.
5pm Critics have lavished praise on Dorset author Joanna Quinn's debut novel, one of this summer's must reads. Her work is compared to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles and Mary Wesley's Camomile Lawn. 'The Whalebone Theatre' has been described as “an utterly captivating epic with characters you cannot help but fall in love with,” and a “sheer, undiluted delight from start to finish.”
Set in a big house on the Dorset coast and spanning the decades between the end of World War I and the aftermath of World War II, this multi-generational saga is by turns hilarious and heart-breaking. At its heart is the coming-of-age story of Cristabel Seagrave, a bookish 12-year-old orphan, who creates a theatre from the ribs of a dead whale washed up on the coast, in which she acts out the plays she finds in her dead father’s study. As she forges her own unconventional story she grows into an “unmarriageable” young woman working behind enemy lines in occupied France…
Joanna will be in conversation with Gail Marshall, Head of the School of Languages and Literature at Reading University, who has a special interest in women’s writing and history.
Sunday 17th September, 7pm The Big Book Quiz
With prizes galore, we’re celebrating books and reading with a fiendish quiz for the whole family - and money raised will go to local charity Read for Good to help them with their work motivating kids to read - especially in school libraries.
With teams of four (you can enter as a team or we’ll put people together on the night), we’re laying down the literary gauntlet to raise money for charity. A sort of cross between University Challenge and a pub quiz, all the questions will be about books and book people. With rounds covering topics from children's picture books to Persephone heroines, and this year's bestsellers to cookbook classics, no genre will go untouched.
Everyone will have a chance to shine, and everyone will be a winner, with bookish treats for everyone who comes along.
Your starter for ten? Name ten authors with Tetbury connections...
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Bonus Event with Helen Rebanks - Sunday 24th September: The Farmer’s Wife: My Life in Days
is a beautifully illustrated, honest and intimate meditation on the power of domestic life. Helen is many things as well as a wife: businesswoman, teacher, conservationist, working mother and cook. She lives with her family in the Lake District and has been cooking and baking for more than 30 years. Her love and enthusiasm for food and farming is completely infectious, and her recipes are delicious.
Helen will be discussing her engrossing and tenacious account both of the running a home, and of the tightly knit family team which has made their farm globally important with its innovations and drive towards sustainability.
