Tetbury Book Festival 2024
Friday 13 to Sunday 15 September (+ Book Quiz on 18 Sept)
A Yellow lighted bookshop event · Meg rosoff · Richard Fortey · Eleanor barraclough · Rosanna pike · Darren freebury-jones · ben masters · Daniel light · dai George · Sarah Corbett · Katy Evans · Martha Sprackland · Declan Ryan · Chrissy Williams · will burns · the bookshop band · and the Big Book QuizBritain’s best small literary festival returns to Tetbury from 13-15 September with talks, poetry, workshops, live music and a fiendish literary quiz night.
Located at Tetbury Goods Shed and Tetbury Malt House (for the workshops), all events can be pre-booked through the Goods Shed online box office and via the individual event links on this page.
Please note that there is a maximum of 15 places at each of the two workshops so please book early to be sure of securing a ticket.
Group discounts
Book five places for any event and get the fifth ticket free! If you have any questions or need help with booking, please contact the Goods Shed office on 01666 505 496 or call the booking line direct on 0333 666 4466.
Festival Programme
Saturday 14 September
11am – Richard Fortey – Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind: In Pursuit of Remarkable Mushrooms
11.15am – Workshop: Sarah Corbett – A Craftivist Workshop
1pm – Eleanor Barraclough – Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
3pm – Sarah Corbett and Katy Bevan – Craft, Community and Changing the World
Sunday 15 September
11am – Daniel Light – The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering
11.15am – The Bookshop Band: A Musical Workshop
1pm – Dai George: How to Think Like a Poet – The Poems That Made Our World and Why We Need Them
3pm – Four Poets: Martha Sprackland, Declan Ryan, Chrissy Willams, Will Burns
5pm – Rosanna Pike – A Little Trickerie
7pm – Darren Freebury-Jones: Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers
Wednesday 18 September
All events take place at Tetbury Goods Shed unless stated otherwise
Friday 13 September
Friday 13 September at 7pm at The Goods Shed
Meg Rosoff – Almost Nothing Happened: Writing for Young Adults
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.
Meg will discuss her new book, Almost Nothing Happened, why writing for teenagers is so important, and how it has the capacity to change lives. Her heroes are ordinary people dealing with extraordinary situations and the choices they make.
This event would be great for young adults, teachers, parents, and anyone who writes, as well as a more general audience.
Saturday 14 September
Saturday 14 September at 11am at The Goods Shed
Richard Fortey – Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind: In Pursuit of Remarkable Mushrooms
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.
Saturday 14 September at 11.15am at The Malt House
Workshop: Sarah Corbett – A Craftivist Workshop
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 at Tetbury Malt House, providing a safe space with soothing smells and 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. No craft skills needed. Adult workshop (suitable for ages 14+).
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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.
Saturday 14 September at 1pm at The Goods Shed
Eleanor Barraclough – Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
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
Saturday 14 September at 3pm at The Goods Shed
Sarah Corbett and Katy Bevan – Craft, Community and Changing the World
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.
Saturday 14 September at 5pm at The Goods Shed
Ben Masters: The Flitting
Ben’s father 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 when his father became terminally ill, 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.
Saturday 14 September at 7pm at The Goods Shed
The Bookshop Band: Emerge Return
The Bookshop Band play songs based on their own response to books they have read. Their new album, Emerge Return, features songs inspired by books by authors including Philip Pullman, Margaret Atwood, Shaun Bythell, Yann Martel, Robert Macfarlane, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Aldous Huxley and many others.
It was produced by Pete Townshend, who says:
“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.”
Sunday 15 September
Sunday 15 September at 11.15am at The Malt House
The Bookshop Band: A Musical Workshop
Ben and Beth are not only brilliant song writers, they are also talented musicians and enthusiastic communicators. Join them for a simple songwriting workshop, taking you through how they go about their craft, and starting a simple song or two.
Open to all ages and abilities.
Sunday 15 September at 11am at The Goods Shed
Daniel Light – The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering
Dan will be introducing his new book, ‘The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering‘. Described by Sir Ranulph Feinnes as…
‘a beautifully written and sure-footed history of mountaineering “before Everest”, full of wonderful stories and spanning continents and centuries’
…it will take you on a panoramic journey through the history of mountaineering,
We meet devout Incan priests who scaled the Andes’ icy slopes; Gurkha riflemen who canvassed the Karakoram; 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 to the fundamental human drive to climb higher and higher.
Sunday 15 September at 1pm at The Goods Shed
Dai George: How to Think Like a Poet – The Poems That Made Our World and Why We Need Them
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.
Sunday 15 September at 3pm at The Goods Shed
Four Poets
Join us for a dazzling line-up of prizewinning poets, who will be converging on Tetbury to read poems on music, motherhood, masculinity, boxing, birds and much, much more.
As a bit of a challenge, email us an idea or theme, and one of our poets will write a poem on that theme that they will perform at the event.
Martha Sprackland is a writer, editor and translator now living in Nailsworth. Previously an editor for Faber & Faber, Unbound, CHEERIO Publishing and Poetry London, she was also co-founder of independent publisher Offord Road Books. Her debut collection Citadel (Pavilion Poetry, 2020) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Prize. She is a tutor for Arvon and the Poetry School, and a mentor for the Women Poets’ Prize. She is currently 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 & Faber in 2023. His essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, including the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, the Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, and Boxing News. He lives in London.
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 with his debut pamphlet, praised in the Guardian for its ‘quiet intelligence and subtle ways of seeing’. In 2019 he released Chalk Hill Blue, a collaborative album made with the composer Hannah Peel, which set his poems to her music. Will’s 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.
There will be a chance to put your questions to the poets after the event, to buy their books, and to raise a glass with them in the pub next door!
Sunday 15 September at 5pm at The Goods Shed
Rosanna Pike – A Little Trickerie
Rosanna’s new book 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 about her book, on 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??
Sunday 15 September at 7pm at The Goods Shed
Darren Freebury-Jones: Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers
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 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.
Darren Freebury-Jones explores 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.
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Wednesday 18 September
Wednesday 18 at 7pm at The Goods Shed
The Book Quiz!
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 the winning team on the night.
But pretty much everyone will win prizes!