Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

A talented writer, broadcaster and campaigner, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is widely known for his uncompromising commitment to seasonal, ethically produced food and has earned a huge following through his River Cottage TV series and books. We’re delighted to welcome him to Port Eliot as one of only two festival performances all summer.

Hugh’s early smallholding experiences were shown in Channel 4′s River Cottage series and led to the publication of The River Cottage Cookbook (2001), which won the Glenfiddich Trophy and the André Simon Food Book of the Year awards. The success of the show and books allowed Hugh to establish River Cottage HQ near Bridport in 2004. In the same year, Hugh published The River Cottage Meat Book to wide acclaim and won a second André Simon Food Book of the Year Award. He continues to write as a journalist, including a weekly column in The Guardian, and is Patron of the National Farmers’ Retail and Markets Association (FARMA). In 2006, River Cottage HQ moved to a farm near the Dorset/Devon border, where visitors can take a variety of courses.

During River Cottage Spring (2008) Hugh helped a group of Bristol families start a smallholding on derelict council land. The experience was so inspiring he decided to see if it would work nationwide, and Landshare was created to bring keen growers and landowners together. The movement now includes more than 45,000 people.

www.rivercottage.net
www.landshare.net
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Facebook page
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“Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is quite my favourite of all the prominent food-writers and presenters. Never quite as shaggy, messy and disgusting as he first appears, his great knowledge, passion, insight, intelligence and skill are hidden under the silliest hair in Europe.”
Stephen Fry

Links:

• Read Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s column in The Guardian
• Janet Street-Porter interviews Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in Marie Claire
• Interview with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in The Times

Video:

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall talks about the Eat Seasonably Campaign:

Originally hailing from Essex, Luke has been a performance poet for over ten years. Since 2006 he has toured the country with four different shows, all of which have been performed to critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe. His most recent, The Petty Concerns of Luke Wright, received a series of 5-star reviews including The Evening Standard, which said he was “positively life enhancing, as well as hilarious”.

He is the co-founder of poetry collective Aisle 16, and alongside a number of fellow male poets has satirically formed the UK’s only ‘Poetry Boyband’. He is also Radio 4’s poet-in-residence for the show Saturday Live and was involved in the Channel 4 documentary Seven Ages of Love (2009). Away from poetry he has also written a book alongside Joel Stickley, entitled Who Writes this Crap? (2008) which The Independent stated left “no brand of modern toxic text unscorned”.

www.lukewright.co.uk

www.facebook.com/Luke-Wright

www.twitter.com/lukewrightpoet

“The best young performance poet around.”
The Observer

“Luke Wright’s poems hit their mark with pinpoint precision.”
Time Out

Links:

• A review of Luke Wright’s show Poet Laureate by the Metro
• Luke Wright’s collaboration with Aisle 16 members for Poetry Boyband
• Listen to Luke Wright’s poems for Radio One, ‘Soaps’ and ‘Skins vs Grange Hill’

Video:

Luke reads poem ‘The Ballad of Barlow Burton’:

Diana’s latest book Life Class brings together four of her best-loved memoirs in a celebration of her life and writing. She’ll be in conversation with Ian Jack and reading one of her short stories at Tea with Persephone.

Born in 1917, Diana worked for the BBC throughout the Second World War before establishing the publishing company, André Deutsch, where she was the editorial director for fifty years.

Her books include Stet: A Memoir (2000) an account of her time in publishing and Somewhere Towards the End (2008) which won the Costa Award.

“It is Athill’s ability to draw the consolation of beauty from the smallest observed moments that turns her telling of her life — at all its stages — into art; it is that ability, too, that nourishes the reader and makes the author a true friend.”
The Times

“What sets her apart is the flagrancy and wit of her writing… her memoirs display a vivacious appreciation of the life she has lived and what is still to come.”
New Statesman

Links:

• Diana Athill on the BBC’s Imagine programme
• Interview with Diana Athill in The Guardian
• Review of Diana Athill in The Times

Video: Alice Munro In Conversation with Diana Athill

A dark comedy set in a Dublin Catholic school run by priests, it follows the lives of a group of boarding school boys interwoven with the hapless romantic adventures of their emotionally inadequate history teacher, Howard (the coward).

Murray skillfully replicates the adolescence mindset of teenage boys: the optimism and cynicism, the fantasy and cruelty – supported with a dialogue that’s joyful, dirty and sex-obsessed. Along with satchels full of comedy, there’s also a tragic undertone – but Murray doesn’t shy away from the difficult material and covers everything from love and death to the war and drugs to porn and prehistoric portals into fairy kingdoms.

An Evening of Long Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Irish Fiction Award in 2003. It’s a hilarious satire of modern Ireland told through the eyes of a clueless young idler who prefers to watch Gene Tierney movies in his chaise lounge rather than go out and find a job.

“A gigantic, marvellous, witty, heartbreaking novel … Murray is excellent at capturing the woes of adolescence…the writing is second to none, the banter between boys brilliant”
— The Daily Telegraph

“Paul Murray proves that he can conjure up a whole psychic world, from its darkest, most savagely funny cruelty to its wildest flights of fantasy-fuelled innocence.”
— The Sunday Times

Links:

• Interview with Paul Murray in Notes from the Underground
• Review of Skippy Dies in the Sunday Times
• Review of Skippy Dies in the Observer

Nicholas is the direct descendant of the Bassets, the Godolphins and the Seyntaubins, the families whom he writes about with such conviction. The family seat is now in St Michael’s Mount, a focal point of the book.

After winning a scholarship to Oxford, Nick’s versatile career led him from downtown Soweto to uptown Manhattan, and from a trading floor in London to a trading estate in Redruth. He spent ten years in Cornwall where he had business and farming ventures and stood for Parliament three times, before later serving as MP for Guildford. He is currently Chairman of the Arab British Centre, a charity to promote cultural awareness.

Find our more about Custom of the County at www.redandblackpress.com

Read Tom’s blog here

Matt was a correspondent for Newsday for 13 years and spent much of that time as a foreign correspondent. He has covered conflicts in Kosovo, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Nigeria and Lebanon and has reported in numerous other countries including Burma, Egypt, Morocco, Iran, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, Argentina, Spain, Poland, Germany, Italy, France and Montenegro.

He has published several acclaimed books including: Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam’s Iraq and Beyond the Mountains of the Damned: The War in Kosovo, and has contributed to many others. He is currently a contributing editor at Details magazine.

Matt has won numerous awards for his journalism including the Osborn Elliott Award for Excellence, for his coverage of Nepal in 2006 and several overseas Press Club citations for his international reporting.

His latest book, Bittersweet: Lessons from my Mother’s Kitchen, published in the US in 2009 and in the UK in April 2010, is an unforgettable tale of family, food and love.

www.mcallester.com
Read Matt McAllester’s blog

“McAllester has produced in Bittersweet a scrupulously honest dispatch that’s every bit as gripping as a report from Abu Ghraib, and every bit as vital … a mosaic of the disorienting facts of life after death – the prayers we con ourselves with, the old sorrows we uncover – assembled with an utterly unsentimental eye.”
Newsweek

Links:

• Matt McAllester talks about his mother and cooking in The Telegraph
• Read an article by Matt McAllester in the Global Post

Simon describes post-War optimism as “A world where we were all going on a summer holiday — until it got cancelled by Lou Reed, Recession Relativism and Radiohead”. He invites us to experience the ‘Bright Glad Confident Morning’ again…helped by eating ice cream and listening to gorgeous sunshine pop.

Festival-goers can expect an insight into the world of writing from profwriting.com’s contributing authors, editors and agents, plus informal interviews, feedback sessions and signings.

Writer, composer and radio producer Paul Dodgson will be running morning writing workshops, giving you the chance to write or record short dispatches about your festival experience. Oscar-winning film-maker Jane Pugh will host open-mic sessions for people to read or perform their work on their new writing stage and community radio station, The Source 96.1FM will broadcast live from the festival and capture performances to stream on the internet.

Profwriting.com is an online writers’ resource created by the MA Professional Writing course team and students at University College Falmouth for writers who want to brush up their skills and have their work critiqued by peers and experts. Offering resources for writers and industry information, it’s a community of like-minded writers working in all genres and forms, mentoring with practising authors and online writing courses.

www.profwriting.com

Miracle Theatre Company is one of Britain’s foremost outdoor theatre companies, and has been touring innovative productions of classic works and new writing across the UK for over 30 years. It is one of Cornwall’s most distinctive voices, with a reputation for entertaining, intelligent, very funny and often startlingly original theatre that builds instant rapport with audiences.

www.miracletheatre.co.uk

Heads & Tales, a Bristol-based new writing company specialising in site-specific and live literature, has run a number of community-based literature projects, worked with Bristol Old Vic, Bath Fringe Festival, Bristol Festival of Nature and Secret Garden Party, and is currently producing a series of audio stories for walking routes in Bristol and South Gloucestershire, funded by Bristol and South Gloucestershire Councils.

www.headsandtales.org.uk

The Source 96.1FM was the first successful community radio application to Ofcom for a full time, locally operated radio station to deliver community self-empowerment through broadcasting. Run by volunteers, it broadcasts a diverse range of programmes, from a community soap opera to music, comedy and chat shows.

www.thesourcefm.co.uk

Paul Dodgson, a Bristol-based writer, composer and radio producer, has written 12 plays for Radio 4 and produced and directed more than 400 programmes for BBC radio. He is currently writer-in-residence at Exeter University.

Jane Pugh is a writer, script editor, filmmaker and associate artist at Hall for Cornwall. Two of her short films have been produced with the support of the UK Film Council and her stage plays have toured with the support of Arts Council England. One of her films won an Oscar for best student foreign film.

FEAST is a programme that makes great art happen across Cornwall.

FEAST’S ambition is to touch and inspire people and generate a whole new wave of creative activity in our communities. There are opportunities for audiences to enjoy events, but the focus is on bringing people together to take part in creative projects, and on animating local celebrations and cultural life.

www.feastcornwall.org