North Cornwall Book Festival

Legendary Costa-winning YA author, Frances Hardinge, in conversation with bibliotherapist (and huge fan) Ella Berthoud at the 2022 North Cornwall Book Festival.

In the final talk of the 2022 North Cornwall BooK Festival broadcaster, Petroc Trelawny talks to airline pilot and polymath, Mark Vanhoenacker about his luminous memoir of boyhood and the allure of his favourite cities around the world, Imagine a City.

Beth Underdown reads from her latest mystery, The Key in the Lock as part of the Cream of Cornish event at the 2022 North Cornwall Book Festival. She’s introduced by novelist, Patrick Gale.

Ellen Hawley reads from her (then) latest novel, Other People Manage,bas part of the Cream of Cornish event at the 2022 North Cornwall Book Festival. She’s introduced by novelist, Patrick Gale.

Charlie Carroll reads from his debut novel, The Lip, as part of the Cream of Cornish event at the 2022 North Cornwall Book Festival. He’s introduced by novelist, Patrick Gale.

Professor Onyeka Nubia enthrals a packed marquee at the 2022 North Cornwall Book Festival with a talk about Britain’s black Elizabethans, based on his book England’s Other Countrymen.

One of the country’s funniest and most wildly inventive novelists, Jasper Fforde, holds a packed marquee in the palm of his hand at the 2022 North Cornwall Book Festival, where he gave a whistle stop tour of his phenomenal career.

Half-sister novelists, Esther Freud and Susie Boyt talk to novelist, Patrick Gale about their novels I Couldn’t Love You More and Loved and Missed at the 2022 North Cornwall Book Festival. Astonishingly it was the first time they’d shared a stage.

Inua Ellams performs some of his poems to a rapt night-time marquee at one of the most atmospheric events of 2023’s festival.

A&E doctor, children’s novelist and now Labour councillor, Roopa Farooki talks to Patrick Gale about her gut-wrenching memoir about working in A&E as the Covid epidemic hit, Everything Is True.

Legendary editor and one of the founders of Virago talks to novelist and memoirist Tiffany Murray about her memoir, A Bite of the Apple.

Kit de Waal, author of the runaway bestseller, My Name is Leon, talks to legendary publisher Lennie Goodings about her funny-ouch memoir of her Jehovah’s Witness girlhood, Without Warning and Only Sometimes.

Million copy bestseller and founder of the Women’s Prize, Kate Mosse in conversation with novelist/memoirist Kate Mosse about An Extra Pair of Hands - her memoir about caring for elderly relatives - and gives a glimpse of Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries, her book of potted feminist inspirations.

A keen “day sailor” since boyhood, Philip Marsden had long been entranced by the mystical lure of the Summer Isles since long distant visits to an inspirational aunt who made a life and mysteriously died on one of them. His latest book, The Summer Isles tells how, with beguilingly insane bravado, he buys a clinker-built yacht and sails from his home in South Cornwall up the west coast to revisit them. Marsden, being a polymath as well as sailor, his occasionally hair-raising adventures along the way are spiced with the histories and myths of the fascinating places he visits. This was the closing event of North Cornwall Book Festival 2021.

Stepping in at the last minute, Patrick Gale talks to Cathy Rentzenbrink about his novel based on the youth of Cornish poet Charles Causley, Mother's Boy. Recorded at North Cornwall Book Festival 2021.

Legendary garden writer Anna Pavord’s latest book, Landskipping, is a fascinating history of a peculiarly British fascination with landscape shot through with autobiographical glimpses that place Anna within that historical. What is it about landscape, she asks, that we find beautiful? How does landscape comfort us, fill us with awe or simply mesmerise us? Anna was in conversation with obsessive gardener Patrick Gale at North Cornwall Book Festival 2021.

Colombo-born George Alagiah is familiar to millions as a BBC journalist and newscaster and, more recently, as a figurehead for cancer patients and campaigner for improved cancer screening. He is the author of two memoirs charting his family story and the process of becoming an Englishman: A Passage to Africa and A Home from Home: from Immigrant Boy to English Man but has now turned novelist with his well-received thriller of murky dealings in post-apartheid South Africa, The Burning Land. George was in conversation with a fellow star of the BBC, Petroc Trelawny, at North Cornwall Book Festival 2021.

Peppered with anecdotes, On the Brink is a rich and personal insight into the life and times of the Fox family, whose success in Cornwall and beyond spanned across three centuries. Colourful stories from the author's own experience of working within the family's shipping business, along with historical reference, portray an intricate account of the contribution the Foxes made to the history of Falmouth. Charles read this extract from On the Brink as part of the Cream of Cornish event at North Cornwall Book Festival 2021.

This is the incredible story of a Second World War shoot-out between black and white American soldiers in a quiet Cornish town that ended up putting the ‘special relationship’ itself on trial. The subsequent court martial into what tabloids labelled a ‘wild west’ mutiny became front page news in Great Britain and the USA. Three thousand miles across the Atlantic, it mirrored and bolstered a fast-accelerating civil rights movement. At home it caused Churchill himself ‘grave anxiety’ while refracting an extraordinary truth about the real state of Anglo-American relations. For three long days the story raged before the turbulent war-torn world moved on and forgot forever amid ever-escalating D-Day preparations. This account of a shocking drama the authorities tried to hush up has been painstakingly pieced back together for the first time thanks to new archival research. When slotted into its unique context, extracted from wartime cabinet documents, secret government surveys, opinion polls, diaries, letters and newspapers as well as testimony from those who remember it, the story offers a rare and stunning window into a little-known dark side of the ‘American Invasion.’ By breathing new life into a vanished trial, it reveals a rare and surprising insight into the wider story of how Britain reacted to soldiers of the Jim Crow army when they came to stay. Kate read this extract as part of the Cream of Cornwall event at North Cornwall Book Festival 2021.

This session presents two very exciting debut novels from writers who have each been fearless in rattling family skeletons or using elements of autobiography to come up with something fresh and startling. Eleanor Anstruther’s A Perfect Explanation was inspired by her discovery that her grandmother, the granddaughter of the 8th Duke of Argyll, sold her father to her aunt for £500 to raise him as her own. Paul Mendez worked as an actor before settling into a writing career. His Rainbow Milk draws, in its portrayal of a boy’s search for his true, Jamaican father, on his own troubled early life as an “unfellowshipped” gay son of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Black Country. Eleanor and Paul were in conversation with Colin Midson, director of Bookshaped and artistic director of the Falmouth Book Festival. We apologise for the slight audio issues in this recording caused by technical problems at the live event.