Welcome to the opening event of 2025 LitFest; ‘They broke Britain, but we can fix it,’ said presenter and media personality Carol Vorderman, as she launched her one-woman campaign to oust the Tories.
We are delighted to have as the LitFest’s keynote speaker Chris Packham CBE, one of Britain’s foremost authors, television presenters and wildlife and environmental campaigners. Chris will be in conversation with David Parker.
Sat 16th
10.30am
Andrew Kelly
How do we create a new cultural renaissance in Bristol?
The Clifton Club
What makes a cultural renaissance in a city? Andrew Kelly, director of Bristol Ideas for three decades, looks back on this history and work and on Bristol in the 1960s to identify what made culture such an important part of Bristol in these years.
Get ready to go on an exciting prehistoric adventure as Ben talks you through the deadliest predators that ever roamed the planet. Yes, dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus Rex, Allosaurus and Spinosaurus may have walked or hunted right where you are now!
10.30am
Clive Burlton
The Story of the Modern Matthew
Christ Church, Crypt
Built to commemorate the 500th anniversary of John Cabot’s medieval voyage, the modern Matthew is an iconic symbol of Bristol’s trading and seafaring heritage.
Michael Malay and Marchelle Farrell both write about learning to appreciate the wondrous natural world in England from the viewpoint of someone making their home in a new country
10.30am
Martin Smith
Matters of Life and Death: Living with History in a Pandemic
Clifton Library, Meeting Room
During the Covid 19 pandemic, Martin Smith was classed as being ‘at risk ' and spent his time in a study crammed with books and DVDs, reminders of his childhood and career.
Whether for sentimental reasons or to turn a profit, it’s good to have an expert’s advice when fixing, repairing or improving decorative household items.
In her debut novel, Georgina Moore follows the story of the Garnett family as the breakdown of mother Margo’s marriage to alcoholic Richard impacts the lives of their daughters, Rachel, Imogen and Sasha, years after the split.
Julian Fisher will be in conversation with Gareth Hoskins about his new book, Think Like a Spy, on mastering the art of influencing and building life-changing alliances – this is how spies work.
12noon
Mark Funnell
Cream Teas and Culture Wars; The National Trust and Contested History
Christ Church
The National Trust’s 2020 report on its properties’ links with historic slavery and colonialism lit a touch paper
12noon
Paul Smith
Hartcliffe Betrayed
Clifton Library, Meeting Room
Paul Smith’s Hartcliffe Betrayed: The Fading of a Post-war Dream is a brilliantly researched examination of how Bristol City Council’s ‘garden city’ aspirations for the building of Hartcliffe housing estate in the 1950s fell so sadly short in their implementation.
12noon
Sarah Edwards
Ethnobotany; Plants, Peoples, Practices
The Clifton Club
Human lives are intertwined and dependent on plants: these more-than-human beings with whom we coinhabit our beautiful planet provide us with air, food, medicine, and materials.
1.30pm
Chris Chapman
Photographing Dartmoor and the South West
Christ Church, Crypt
Chris Chapman is a distinguished photographer of rural life, especially on Dartmoor and in the South West.
In their 2024 anthology, Gathering, editors Durre Shahwar and Nasia Sarwar-Skuse have curated an outstanding, ground-breaking collection of creative and personal essays by women of colour from across the UK. The women write about their relationships with nature, and explore themes such as climate justice, inherited histories, colonialism, mental health, music, rambling and more.
1.30pm
Jane Duffus
The Women Who Built Bristol
The Clifton Club
'The Women Who Built Bristol' project features three volumes, each book containing 250 unique women who helped to shape Bristol into the vibrant city it is today.
1.30pm
Kate Mosse
The Map of Bones (Joubert Family Chronicles)
Christ Church
Kate Mosse CBE FRSL is an award-winning, bestselling novelist, playwright, performer, interviewer and writer of history and memoir.
Roxy Dunn is a writer/performer and graduate of the BBC Comedy Writersroom. She’s acted in multiple television sitcoms and her shows have received sell-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and SOHO Theatre
Professor Anthea Callen’s book 'Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body' is about sex, power and death. She argues that human anatomy, seen through the Greco-Roman tradition of the ideal Classical body, plays an active role in making the modern male body.
3pm
Cato Pedder
Moederland: Nine Daughters of South Africa
Pavey House
Moederland: Nine Daughters of South Africa is an exploration of the roots and legacies of apartheid told through the lives of nine women from the arrival of the first Dutch settlers at the Cape in 1652 to the present day.
Jessica Andrews will be in conversation about her new novel 'Milk Teeth'. Her visceral, sensory novels explore the effects of social class and gender on the body and consider the limitations of social mobility.
3pm
Jon Cruddas
A Century of Labour
Christ Church, Crypt
How might the new Labour Government fare with its huge majority? If its history offers some clues, then Jon Cruddas’ book might just suggest themes to watch out for.
3pm
Moses McKenzie
In conversation with Johanna Thomas-Corr
Christ Church
After a fascinating, insightful talk last year about his Hawthornden Prize-winning debut novel, 'An Olive Grove in Ends', we couldn’t resist bringing Moses McKenzie back to LitFest
Three writers discuss their historical novels and the process of carving fiction out of historical subjects.
4.30pm
Dr Toby Jones
The Medieval Ship Project
Christ Church, Crypt
Dr Toby Jones, Curator of the Newport Medieval Ship Project, will reveal the latest findings of this mid-15th century merchant vessel which traded with Bristol.
Family Politics is a razor-sharp political satire about parents and children supporting different political parties. In a witty and insightful antidote to our recent divided times, new graduate Dylan’s right-on Labour parents are shocked to discover he is a Conservative.
Are You Judging Me Yet? is the title of Kim Moore’s essay collection and sets the tone for readings by three wonderful poets who write about the complexities, vulnerabilities and power of contemporary women's lives in challenging, lyrical, often humorous ways.
4.30pm
Timandra Harkness
Technology is not the problem
Clifton Library, Meeting Room
Why, despite more and more awareness of how we are all profiled and targeted by data-gathering technology, do we seem to embrace it?
After a terrific debut at last year's festival, composer and pianist Sandie Middleton along with flautist, Katie Axelsen, return this year with a programme of music and film to celebrate the centenary of Bristol Archives.
Internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter Kate Dimbleby, violin virtuoso Clare Lindley (DLM; Big Train) and well-known former BBC Radio Bristol personality and musician Keith Warmington, bring together a touch of Americana and Blues with a British sense of homour.
Emma Pusill and Janet Wilkinson would like to talk lidos of the UK with you. A twenty-plus year quest to find and swim in all of the lidos of the UK led to their creation of The Lido Guide.
10am
Kim Moore
Poetry Workshop: The House of Poetry
Clifton Library, Meeting Room
“During this workshop we will be exploring the different ways that we can write about the house – both as a literal and a psychological space. We will explore poems that examine the house as mythical place, as childhood memory, as the theatre of family drama or domestic routine and as a place of both wildness and safety. This will be a practical workshop suitable for beginners and advanced writers"
11am
Ben Garrod
A Dog Called Jack-Jack
Clifton High School, Rose Theatre
Professor Ben Garrod, a popular broadcaster and prolific author, has recently launched his first fiction series: four stories about his dog Jack, entitled The Adventures of a Dog called Jack-Jack. The first volume is Jack-Jack, A Dog in Africa (2024).
Virginia Woolf’s homes, Talland House and Asheham, changed her life and her writing, and were places she hosted many Bloomsbury figures. Woolf loved visiting writers’ houses – the homes of the Brontës and Carlyle. ‘You cannot think what a shock of emotion it gives me – seeing people among their things,’ she wrote to the feminist composer Ethel Smyth.
11.30am
Lilleith Morrison
Paul Stephenson and the Bristol Bus Boycott
Clifton Library
Lilleith Morrison will discuss Memoirs of a Black Englishman by Paul Stephenson OBE, who led the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott. Morrison collaborated with Stephenson to put his life into a political perspective.
12.30pm
Helen Doe
One Crew: The RNLI and 200 Years of Saving Lives at Sea
Clifton High School, Rose Theatre
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution began with a meeting in a London Tavern in March 1824. Since then, its volunteer crews have saved over 146,000 lives around the coasts of Britain and Ireland. Dr Helen Doe was commissioned to write the history of this vital service and in this talk she takes a look at some known and unknown characters and incidents in its rich history. This event is in two parts. Helen Doe's talk followed by the film showing.
12.30pm
Will Hutton
This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain
Clifton High School, Main School Hall
‘Brilliant’ is how Keir Starmer has described Will Hutton’s latest commentary on what has gone wrong with the economy, so he urges everyone to read it. ‘Eminently readable and hugely ambitious’ is how Frances Cairncross characterises the analysis of what has gone wrong in Britain since Brexit, and Hutton’s prescriptions for putting it right.
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award 2024, Noreen Masud’s 'A Flat Place' has been described as raw and radical, strange and beguiling - a love letter to Britain's breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, and a reckoning with the painful, hidden histories they contain.
1pm
Paul Gough
Brothers in Art: Gilbert and Stanley Spencer
Clifton Library
Gilbert and Stanley Spencer were the youngest brothers in the brilliantly versatile family of nine children that grew up in the village of Cookham, Stanley’s ‘paradise on earth’. Best friends and companions, the two were inseparable in childhood; they both studied at the Slade, served in the war (including periods in Bristol), and then took their separate paths as painters and celebrated Royal Academicians.
After her incredibly well received event at the LitFest two years ago, Charlotte Philby returns this year to feature in the first of two special events devoted to the increasingly popular genre of crime fiction. She will be discussing her latest and critically acclaimed work, The End of Summer.
Martin Kiszko, ‘The UK’s Green Poet’, has taken his humorous, theatrical and challenging eco-comedy performance to festivals and venues across the UK and around the globe.
2.30pm
George Marshall
Why we don’t think about climate change – and what will happen when we do
Clifton Library, Meeting Room
Psychological research shows that climate change is an exceptionally difficult issue for us to accept and understand, combining all the qualities that we are worst at dealing with. Difficult...but not impossible: if we directly address these obstacles, we can adapt to climate change and build a better and more sustainable future. But if we don’t, we may descend into ever more irrational and self-destructive coping strategies.
Peter Davies, well known author, critic and seasoned art activist, will tell the story of The Crypt Group, a young avant-garde group of artists who exhibited in the crypt of the former mariners’ church, St Ives which had become the home and gallery of the St Ives Society of Artists in the 1940’s.
3pm
Jonathan Dimbleby
Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War
Clifton High School, Rose Theatre
Biographer and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby makes a welcome return to the Litfest to discuss with Festival chair, David Parker, some of the issues raised in his latest book about the Second World War in the East, Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War.
3.30pm
The Scene of the Crime
Emily Koch, Bryan J Mason & Gilly Macmillan
Clifton High School, Main School Hall
Three successful writers, all living in Bristol, consider just how important in their writing is a sense of 'place'.
4pm
David Leffman
The Masters of Suzhou Woodblocks
Clifton Library
Chinese woodblock prints were the most sophisticated in the world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, depicting depicting everything from folk legends to racy bedroom scenes, cityscapes and delicate flower-and-insect studies, and pioneering colour printing techniques and the use of European-inspired shading and perspective.
4pm
Lia Leendertz
The Rural Almanac
Clifton Library, Meeting Room
Bristol-based Lia Leendertz's reinvention of the traditional, rural almanac has become an annual must-have for readers keen to reconnect with the seasons, appreciate the outdoors, and discover ways to mark and celebrate each month. (It’s also the ideal stocking filler...)
4.30pm
Tony Benn's Defining Moments
Discussion and film with Dawn Primarolo, Ruth Winstone and Jonathan Dimbleby
Clifton High School, Rose Theatre
Tony Benn was a commanding presence in post-war Bristol. An MP in the city from 1950 to 1983, he served in Labour governments during the 1960s and 70s and remained active in politics until his death in 2014.
As a singer-songwriter Phil King has the whole trinity: a beautiful, soulful singing voice; deft skills at playing the guitar; and the capacity to write elegantly worded and powerful songs.
