Dr Gabrielle Walker
Gabrielle is an expert strategist and speaker, with a focus on sustainability, new energy, and climate change. She has presented many TV and radio programs for the BBC. She has been Climate Change Editor at Nature and has written very extensively for many international newspapers and magazines, including The Economist, Prospect, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
She is author of four books including the bestselling “The Hot Topic, how to avoid global warming while still keeping the lights on”, which was described by Al Gore as “a beacon of clarity” and by The Times as “a material gain for the axis of good”. She has a PhD from Cambridge University and has taught at both Cambridge and Princeton Universities.
A self-confessed “ice addict” she has made more than a dozen trips to both poles. She has also climbed trees in the Amazon rainforest, swum with piranhas, been sneezed on by a humpback whale, hooked lava out of a live volcano, and flown in zero gravity.
Peter Harper
Peter Harper coined the term ‘Alternative Technology’ in 1972 and claims he has regretted it ever since. He went on to become head of Research and Innovation at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, working on rapid decarbonisation models for the UK economy. He believes we have now run out of time for fundamental cultural changes and need to focus on technical decarbonisation of the infrastructure, plus negative emission technologies. These are still possible and offer positive visions for the future that could be widely accepted.
Angie Zelter
Knighton resident Angie Zelter is a well-known campaigner on peace, justice, environmental and human rights issues. She works at the grass-roots level in the UK and abroad, encouraging and supporting global citizens, acting in the public interest, and showing by her example, creative and nonviolent ways to resist the cruelty, waste and pollution of society’s present-day structures.
She now lives in Wales working with others to manage woodlands for local use whilst preserving biodiversity and on various local organic food growing projects.
She is a founder member of the Institute for Law and Peace, Trident Ploughshares, the International Women’s Peace Institute – Palestine, Faslane 365 and Action Atomic Weapons Eradication. She is a recipient of the 1997 Sean McBride Peace Prize (for the Seeds of Hope Ploughshares action), and the 2001 Right Livelihood Award (on behalf of Trident Ploughshares).
Camilla Cancantata Saunders
Camilla is a musician, musical director, performer, composer, improviser committed to free improvisation as an art form and means of communication. She uses a combination of scored, unscored, and differently scored ways of conveying musical ideas. In 2000 Camilla co-founded Footloose Community Arts, creating work in response to environmental issues through acts of communal creativity www.footloosearts.co.uk In 2015 she co-founded Terabac, women’s theatre focused on the lives of insects www.terabac.co.uk.
The Teme Valley Environment Group (TVEG)
TVEG is based in and around Knighton, Powys. We are an open group and welcome people of all ages and abilities who are concerned about local sustainability and the environment. Our current concerns include local food production, reduction in the use of plastics, renewable energy supply via our partnership with Knighton Community Woodlands Group and other environmental projects including regular litter picking, developing sign up to free water refill schemes and support to other local single-issue campaigns. We support and have cross membership with other local groups such as Wales in Bloom, and the sustainable food group.
Please join us and be part of a creative and inspiring movement. Or just turn up at one of our open meetings and we’ll be pleased to see you! There is no fee to join. You can join in any of the projects that are already running, you can set up your own project or you can just receive emails about what we are doing. For more information visit the website at tveg.org.uk
Emma Stibbon
Emma Stibbon RA works primarily in drawing and print on paper depicting environments that are undergoing transformation including the polar regions, volcanoes, deserts, coastal and urban locations. Her approach to landscape is driven by a desire to understand how human activity and the forces of nature shape our surroundings. She does this through location-based research often working alongside geologists and scientists, and in the studio where information is transformed into large scale drawn and printed artworks.
‘Many of the environments and landscapes I depict are changing rapidly. As an artist, I feel committed to representing the impact of these changes, be they natural or human. My impulse is to draw, in an effort to act as a witness.’
Working from her studio at Spike Island and Spike Print Studio in Bristol, Stibbon self publishes the majority of her prints. Stibbon’s work is represented by Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, and Galerie Bastian, Berlin.
Andrew Baldwin
Andrew Baldwin is associated with Aberystwyth University School of Art, where for the last 30 years he has taught printmaking. He also runs his own printmaking studio in Trefeglwys Mid Wales running workshops in non-toxic approaches to the medium. He is a frequent traveller to the United States, Canada and Europe, where he is invited to give lectures and workshops, about his art and his revolutionary process.
Andrew Baldwin has devised a new ‘green’ product ‘BIG’ which has now replaced the traditional toxic process previously used in studios around the world. He has also devised many safe mark-making techniques that ranges from randomness to precision, using his invention.
Andrew’s personal work swings from whimsical to dramatic. He uses a “play on words” while he magically creates his work in the velvety blacks of intaglio aquatint while using his new creation. He has won many awards for his work, including the printmaking section of Welsh Artist of the Year.
Madi Acharya-Baskerville
Madi Acharya-Baskerville was born in India and spent her early childhood there before moving to the UK. She graduated with an MA in Fine Art at University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. She lives and works in Oxford, often travelling to the Dorset coast and surrounding forests for inspiration and sourcing of materials and objects. Vintage textiles handed down from the family and textiles sourced from elsewhere also feature in her work. The themes she explores include environmental concerns, migration and exile, and gender issues. Madi’s use of “found” objects unites her work on these different themes, and is in itself an environmentally-friendly form of art-making.
Madi’s work was recently acquired by the Whitworth, University of Manchester, under the Art Fund New Collecting Award scheme. She has also been awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice Grant from Arts Council England. Her recent solo exhibition, My life as a bird at Darl-e- and the Bear gallery, Woodstock, Oxfordshire explored the impact of ocean pollution from plastic and associated debris on wildlife. For more information, see
www.madiacharya-baskerville.org
SEREN BOOKS -100 Poems to Save the Earth edited by Zoe Brigley and Kristian Evans
This anthology features 100 of the best new and established contemporary poets. Writing from rural and urban perspectives, linking issues of social injustice with the need to protect the environment, attend carefully to the new evidence, redraw the maps and, full of trust, keep going, proving that in fact, poetry is exactly what we need to save the earth.
Zoe Brigley
Zoë Brigley has three Poetry Book Society recommended poetry collections: The Secret (2007), Conquest (2012), and Hand & Skull (2019) (all from Bloodaxe). She recently published a poetry chapbook, Aubade After A French Movie (Broken Sleep 2020) and has another forthcoming: Into Eros (Verve, 2021). She has a collection of nonfiction essays Notes from a Swing State (Parthian, 2019). She is Assistant Professor in English at the Ohio State University where she produces an anti-violence podcast: Sinister Myth. She won an Eric Gregory Award for the best British poets under 30, was Forward Prize commended, and listed in the Dylan Thomas Prize. She is co-editor (with Kristian Evans) of the Seren anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth.
Kristian Evans
Kristian Evans is a poet and editor from Kenfig in South Wales, interested in ecological philosophy, magic and receptions of the more-than-human. He has written several texts for performance as well as chapbooks of poems and nonfiction, Unleaving (HappenStance, 2016), and Otherworlds (Broken Sleep, 2021). He is also an amateur naturalist, with a particular interest in sand dune ecology.
Clare Pollard
Clare Pollard has published five collections of poetry with Bloodaxe, most recently Incarnation, and a pamphlet The Lives of the Female Poets, published by Bad Betty Press. Her play The Weather (Faber) premiered at the Royal Court Theatre. She has been involved in numerous translation projects, including co-translating The Sea-Migrations by Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf (Bloodaxe) which received a PEN Translates award. Clare has also translated Ovid’s Heroines (Bloodaxe), which she toured as a one-woman show with Jaybird Live Literature, and Trust by Anna T. Szabo (Arc). She is the current editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and poetry editor for The Idler. Her latest book is a non-fiction title, Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children’s Picture Books (Penguin). Her novel Delphi will be published by Fig Tree (UK) and Avid Reader (US) in 2022.
John McCullough
John McCullough lives in Hove. His third book of poems Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins, 2019) won the Hawthornden Prize and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. His previous collections have been Books of the Year for publications including The Guardian and The Independent. He teaches creative writing at the University of Brighton and for organizations including the Arvon Foundation.
Paul Henry
Paul came to poetry through songwriting. Since receiving an Eric Gregory Award he’s published eight books of poetry with Seren, including The Brittle Sea: New & Selected Poems, Boy Running and Ingrid’s Husband. His poems have been widely anthologized and translated.
Originally from Aberystwyth, Paul has guest-edited Poetry Wales and presented arts programmes for BBC Radio Wales, Radio 3 and Radio 4. A special edition of Poetry Please focused on his work.
He’s performed his poems and songs at literary and music festivals in Europe, Asia and the USA. His last book, The Glass Aisle, inspired a musical collaboration with Stornoway’s Brian Briggs, which toured UK festivals. His next Seren collection will appear in 2022. www.paulhenrypoet.co.uk
“He takes his place as one of the most important Welsh poets now writing.” – Carol Ann Duffy
(on The Glass Aisle).
Fossil Field Trip
Drs Joe Botting and Lucy Muir are semi-professional academic palaeontologists with positions as Honorary Research Fellows at the National Museum Wales. Based mostly in Llandrindod Wells, they regularly spend three months per year at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China, where they are employed to do research.
They have been working on the local fossils of the Builth Inlier, where they live, for around twenty-five years, but also study some of the most important fossil deposits around the world, such as the Fezouata Biota (Morocco) and the Burgess Shale (Canada). Between them, they have published over 100 academic articles on the early fossil record of sponges, graptolites, worms and exceptionally well-preserved remains from many countries, and are responsible for discovering some of the World’s most important Ordovician (495-444 million years ago) fossil sites.
To support amateur palaeontology, Joe and Lucy run a local fossil group, and open their library and microscope facilities to any that need them. When they can fit it in, they also give talks and lead field-trips for special-interest groups and the general public
The Marches Poets
The Marches Poets is a group of ten women who write, living on the borders of Wales, Herefordshire, and Shropshire. The group formed after meeting on a poetry course organised by Aberystwyth University’s Life-Long Learning programme. This year the Marches Poets celebrates their tenth year of writing together, enjoying poetry and sharing their love of words. The group has published five collections and read at events such as the Hay Winter Festival, Ledbury Poetry Festival, and last year’s Knighton Literary Festival.
Crime Cymru panel
Alis Hawkins
A CWA Historical Dagger shortlisted author, Alis Hawkins grew up on a dairy farm in Cardiganshire. Her inner introvert thought it would be a good idea to become a shepherd and, frankly, if she had she might have been published sooner. As it was, three years reading English at Oxford revealed an extrovert streak and a social conscience which sent her off to train as a Speech and Language Therapist.
She has spent the subsequent three decades variously working in a burger restaurant, bringing up two sons, working with homeless people and helping families to understand their autistic children. And writing. Always. Nonfiction (autism related) plays (commissioned for production in heritage locations) and, of course, novels.
Initially fascinated by the medieval period, she began her crime and mystery career at Pan Macmillan with a historical novel set during the fourteenth century then fast-forwarded to West Wales in the nineteenth century to fulfil a long-held desire to write a book based on Wales’s best kept historical secret: the Rebecca Riots. The resulting historical crime series features blind investigator Harry Probert-Lloyd and his chippy assistant, John Davies.
As a side-effect of setting her series in Ceredigion, instead of making research trips to sunny climes like more foresighted writers, she drives up the M4 to see her family. Now living with her partner on the Welsh/English border, Alis speaks Welsh, collects rucksacks and can’t resist an interesting fact.
Katherine Stansfield
Katherine Stansfield is a novelist and poet who grew up in Cornwall and now lives in Cardiff. Her historical crime series Cornish Mysteries is published by Allison & Busby: think X Files meet Sherlock Holmes meets Daphne du Maurier. Book three in the series, The Mermaid’s Call, is out now.
She is also one half of the partnership DK Fields, co-writing the gaslit fantasy crime trilogy Tales of Fenest with David Towsey. Book one, Widow’s Welcome, is out now, published by Head of Zeus. Katherine’s work has won the Holyer an Gof Fiction Prize twice, and she was shortlisted for the Winston Graham Memorial Prize.
Katherine teaches the Writing Crime Fiction courses for Cardiff University’s School of Continuing and Professional Education. She is also an Associate Lecturer for the Open University’s new MA in Creative Writing, a Writing Fellow at the University of South Wales, and a mentor for Literature Wales. When she’s not writing or working with other writers, Katherine is most likely playing board games and hanging out with her cats (all of whom are named after fictional detectives).
Leslie Scase
Leslie Scase is the Shropshire-based author of the Inspector Chard Mysteries, crime thrillers set in the heyday of Victorian Britain. The first novel, Fortuna’s Deadly Shadow, was published in 2020. The second, Fatal Solution, was published on 26th April 2021. An advocate of the ‘classic’ murder mystery genre, Leslie is also a keen historian, which is reflected in the authenticity of his novels.
Born and educated in South Wales, Leslie worked in local industry before travelling widely across the UK during a career in the Civil Service. His first novel was inspired in part by his Italian and English ancestors having settled in South Wales in the late nineteenth century. A keen fly fisherman and real ale enthusiast, he lives close to the Welsh border, in the county town of Shrewsbury.
Facebook page: www.facebook.com/InspectorChard
Twitter page: www.twitter.com/InspectorChard
Welsh literature from Parthian Books
Susie Wild
Susie Wild is author of the poetry collection Better Houses, the short story collection The Art of Contraception listed for the Edge Hill Prize, and the novella Arrivals. Her work has recently featured in Carol Ann Duffy’s pandemic project Write Where We Are Now, The Atlanta Review, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Poetry Wales. She lives in Cardiff
‘Susie Wild writes with poise and precision about the places we inhabit, casting a benevolent spell over her reader.’ – Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
‘These poems are spells whose words bewitch the ordinary and transform the objects and routines of our human world with their word-magic.’ – Gillian Clarke
Gary Raymond
Gary Raymond is a novelist, critic, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of two other novels, The Golden Orphans and For Those Who Come After, as well as a non-fiction book, How Love Actually Ruined Christmas. He has edited a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books, from short story anthologies to political memoir.
As a critic he has been seen in the pages of The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph and heard on BBC Radio Four’s Front Row and
Radio 3’s Sunday Morning Show. Since 2018, he has presented The Review Show for BBC Radio Wales, and since 2012 has been
editor of Wales Arts Review.
Deborah Alma: The Poetry Pharmacy
Deborah Alma has lived on the Welsh/Shropshire borders, where she brought up her two sons, for the last twenty-eight years. She teaches creative writing and has worked with people with dementia for many years.
Deborah is also the world’s first and only Emergency Poet: since 2011 she has travelled around Britain in her ambulance, dispensing one-on-one poetic therapy. In 2017 she and her partner, writer Jim Sheard, opened the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishops Castle, a shop selling all things poetry related, therapeutic space, and hub for poets.
Deborah’s first poetry collection, Dirty Laundry, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2017, and she edited The Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology and The Everyday Poet-Poems to Live By, both published by Michael O’Mara Books, as well as two other landmark poetry anthologies published by Fair Acre Press, #MeToo, and (with Katie Amiel), These are the Hands, published in response to the Covid-19 pandemic to support the NHS, She is currently Honorary Research Fellow and part-time lecturer at Keele University.
Tim Barringer
Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He specializes in the art of Britain and the British Empire since 1700, and nineteenth-century American art. Following positions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Universities of London and Birmingham in Great Britain, he came to Yale in 1998.
His books include ‘Reading the Pre-Raphaelites’ (Yale, 1998), ‘Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain’ (Yale, 2005) and ‘David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life (Royal Academy, 2016). Co-edited collections of essays include ‘Colonialism and the Object’; ‘Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity’, and ‘Writing the Pre-Raphaelites.’ With co-editors Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham, he published Art and the British Empire in 2007.
In 2018, a collection of essays ‘Victorian Jamaica’ (co-edited with Wayne Modest) was published by Duke University Press. ‘On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama from Canvas to Screen’(co-edited with Katie Trumpener) appeared with Yale University Press in 2020.
Graham Trew
Drama, winning the Gold Medal of the School in his final year, and at London University. His extensive international career has included operatic roles in France, Ireland and Holland, oratorio, recitals and recordings in Italy, the U.S.A., South Africa and the Antipodes, and television and radio recitals in Germany and the Caribbean.
He has given masterclasses and judged prizes at the Royal Academy of Music, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Birmingham Conservatoire, Leeds College of Music and Colchester Institute. Graham conducts the Llanfair Singers and is a guest conductor of the Rhayader Male Voice Choir. He is President of Knighton and District Concert Society.
John Davis: Knighton Historical Walk
John Davis has lived in Knighton for some twenty years, and, with Margaret his wife, is painstakingly restoring a house of sixteenth-century origins that was remodelled in the Regency period.
Old buildings and the development of the landscape have been among his abiding interests throughout life, and, as a young boy in Manchester, he was fascinated by the city’s architecture, including the bomb-damaged Cathedral after the Second World War (not a sphere of interest shared by many others!). Since his move to Knighton, John has delved deeply into the fascinating history and architecture of the town and will generously share his knowledge with Festivalgoers during a guided walk on the afternoon of Sunday October 10 between 2.00 and 3.30pm. Numbers are limited; please register
Dan Llywelyn Hall
Dan Llywelyn Hall was born in Cardiff in 1980 and grew up in south Wales. He graduated from the University of Westminster in 2003, and a succession of group and solo exhibitions established him as a painter working directly from the landscape. Dan became increasingly interested in portraiture, and his commissions have included Her Majesty The Queen and the late singer Amy Winehouse. In 2021, Dan walked the 177 miles of the Offa’s Dyke Path to celebrate its 50th anniversary and made a series of sixteen paintings that are currently displayed in a special exhibition at the Offa’s Dyke Centre in Knighton, Walking with Offa (Cerdded gydag Offa).
The paintings are accompanied by twelve specially commissioned poems by well-known Welsh poets. A book featuring the paintings and poems is available from the Offa’s Dyke Centre and can be ordered online:
https://offasdyke.org.uk/product/walking-with-offa-cerdded-gydag-offa/
The artist also commissioned a series of six short films, each showing one of the poets reciting their poem on Offa’s Dyke. These will be shown in the online Knighton Festival on Saturday October 9.