Patrick Mackie

Thursday 23rd - 16.30

Greyhounds, 19-23 Sheep Street

Poet Patrick Mackie introduces us to his book Mozart in Motion, with chapters arranged around pieces of music from Mozart’s oeuvre, Mackie takes us on a journey into the pleasures of Mozart’s work, into major and lesser known moments of Mozart’s life, and into the concerns, attitudes and mores of the eighteenth century.

Dr Richard Smith

Thursday 23rd - 16.30

Burford Primary School

Following his sell out book launch lecture and signing at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC and his presentation to the world’s oldest natural history society – The Linnean Society of London we are delighted that marine biologist, internationally acclaimed underwater photographer Dr Richard Smith, who works to promote an appreciation for the ocean’s inhabitants and raise awareness of marine conservation issues will be introducing us to The World Beneath our oceans. Perfect for an audience of every age.

Jan Harvey

Friday 24th - 11.00

Greening Room @ Warwick Hall

Jan Harvey, author of The Seven Letters and The Slow Death of Maxwell Carrick, will reveal the real people behind her fictional female characters. From the women who defined their age to those who defy their age! With her third book ready for publication, Jan will provide a preview of the story and why she has chosen Burford as a backdrop.

Chris Salisbury

Friday 24th - 11.30

Greyhounds, 19-23 Sheep Street

More than 80% of us live under light-polluted skies but it's never too late to embrace the darkness. With a foreword by Chris Packham Wild Nights Out is a wonderful invitation to rediscover the dark and all things that cry, creep or glow! Chris will be inviting us to explore the mysterious folds of darkness and teaching us how to reframe our relationship with the dark and get the best out of the night. Wild Nights out is the perfect nocturnal empowerment for the curious of every age!

Sarah Steele

Friday 24th - 12.30

The Nell Gwyn Room @ Cotswold Glass & Crafts

Sarah Steele trained as a classical pianist and violinist before joining the world of publishing as an editorial assistant at Hodder and Stoughton. She was for many years a freelance editor, and now lives in the vibrant Gloucestershire town of Stroud. Her debut novel The Missing Pieces of Nancy Moon was published by Headline. Sarah will be talking about the passion behind this internationally best-selling novel.

Anne Youngson & Rachel Joyce

Friday 24th - 15.00

Greening Room @ Warwick Hall

Anne Youngson’s first novel Meet Me at the Museum was shortlisted for a Costa Prize and was recently adapted for Radio 4. Her second novel Three Women and a Boat, a journey over the glorious waterways of England and into the unfathomable depths of the human heart is disarmingly truthful and fast becoming a runaway bestseller. Rachel Joyce is the author of the Sunday Times and international bestsellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy and The Music Shop. Her latest novel, Miss Bensons Beetle has been shortlisted for the 2021 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize/Best Published Novel and we are delighted to bring these two authors together in conversation.

Lorna Gray - Book Binding Workshop

Friday 24th - 15.00

The Nell Gwyn Room @ Cotswold Glass & Crafts

Learn traditional book binding and make your own hand bound hardback notebook. The ticket price includes a special book binding kit which contains everything you will need on the day. In this warm and relaxed session, you will be taken step by step through the stages of binding your own A6 hardback notebook filled with artist quality cartridge paper using a traditional technique – perfect to give as a gift or keep for yourself! This is the perfect introduction to traditional book binding. Spaces are limited. The workshop runs for approximately 2 hours.

Francesca Gibbons - Junior Creative Writing Workshop

Friday 24th - 16.30

Gauntlet Room @ Warwick Hall

Francesca Gibbons has been telling tall tales for as long as she can remember. She had the idea for The Shadow Moth when she was a child. Now it’s the first book in her middle-grade trilogy, A Clock of Stars, with book two due later this year. In our opinion Francesca Gibbons is akin to CS Lewis and we are delighted she will be running this workshop. Suitable for ages 11-13. Tickets are free but must be booked in advance.

Brian Kay - Words & Music

Friday 24th - 19.00

Greening Room @ Warwick Hall

Brian Kay was the original bass in the world-renowned vocal group The King’s Singers, performing over 2,000 concerts worldwide and for 25 years wrote and presented thousands of programmes for BBC Radios 2, 3 and 4 and the World Service. For television he presented the Cardiff Singer of the World, the Choir of the Year Competition and, for fifteen years, the much-loved New Year’s Day concert of the Vienna Philharmonic. He has twice won the Sony Radio Award as ‘Music Presenter of the Year’, including the coveted Gold Award in 1996 and following the recent publication of his biography Music, My Life we are delighted to welcome Brian to Burford Lit Fest to give us an entertaining look at words and music. Ticket price includes a glass of wine.

Tamsin Calidas

Saturday 25th - 11.30

Greening Room @ Warwick Hall

When Tamsin Calidas first arrives on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides, it feels like coming home. Disenchanted by London, she and her husband left the city and high-flying careers to move 500 miles north, despite having absolutely no experience of island life. It was idyllic, for a while. But as the months wear on, the children she longed for fail to materialise, and her marriage breaks down, Tamsin finds herself in ever-increasing isolation. Injured, ill, alone and without money, she is pared right back, stripped to becoming simply a raw element of the often-harsh landscape. But with that immersion in her surroundings comes the possibility of rebirth and renewal. Tamsin begins the slow journey back from the brink. Startling, raw and extremely moving, I AM AN ISLAND is a story about the incredible ability of the natural world to provide when everything else has fallen away - a stunning book about solitude, friendship, resilience and self-discovery.

Shimrit Janes & Paul Miller

Saturday 25th - 12.00

Gauntlet Room @ Warwick Hall

A Nature of Work: The New Story of Work for a Living Age : In Nature of Work, Paul Miller, CEO and Founder of Digital Workplace Group (DWG), and Shimrit Janes, DWG’s Director of Knowledge, draw on patterns from forests and the natural world to illustrate a dynamic, vital and more beautiful world of work that our hearts and minds know is possible. Nature of Work is a manifesto and guidebook. through the lens of nature, it explores 12 essential workplace elements, such as health, habitat, regeneration, intelligence, relationships and purpose, underpinned by real-life stories of organisations and people already on the journey to new ways of working.

Talking Crime

Saturday 25th - 14.00

Old Hall @ Warwick Hall

Mick Herron / Lesley Thompson / Elly Griffiths: Three of the UK’s finest award winning crime writers come together to talk writing, crime and how to solve it – guaranteed to appeal to all crime and thriller fans. Mick Herron’s novels include the Gold and Steel-Dagger-winning Slough House series, about a bunch of messed-up spies. Lesley Thompson has received great accolade for her international best selling series The Detective Daughter and Death Of A Mermaid, released earlier this year is set to follow in from that success. Elly Griffiths wrote four novels under her own name (Domenica de Rosa) before turning to crime with The Crossing which won the Mary Higgins Clark award and three novels in the series have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year. Her first standalone mystery, The Stranger Diaries, won the 2020 Edgar award for Best Crime Novel. The second, The Postscript Murders, has recently been shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. 

Tom Chivers

Saturday 25th - 16.00

Greening Room @ Warwick Hall

Part personal memoir, part lyrical meditation, London Clay takes us deep in to the nooks and crannies of a forgotten city: a hidden landscape long buried underneath the sprawling metropolis. Armed with just his tattered Streetfinder map, author Tom Chivers follows concealed pathways and explores lost islands, to uncover the geological mysteries that burst up through the pavement and bubble to the surface of our streets. From Roman ruins to a submerged playhouse, abandoned Tube stations to ancient riverbeds, marshes and woodlands, this network of journeys combines to produce a compelling interrogation of London's past. London Clay examines landscape and our connection to place, and celebrates urban edgelands: in-between spaces where the natural world and the city mingle, and where ghosts of the deep past can be felt as a buzzing in the skull. It is also a personal account of growing up in London, and of overcoming loss through the layered stories of the capital. Written in rich and vivid prose, London Clay will inspire readers to think about what lies beneath their feet, and by doing so reveal new ways of looking at the city.

Maggie Shipstead

Saturday 25th - 18.00

Greening Room @ Warwick Hall

The Great Circle: ( longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize 2021) From the night she is rescued as a baby out of the flames of a sinking ship; to the day she joins a pair of daredevil pilots looping and diving over the rugged forests of her childhood, the life of Marian Graves has always been marked by a lust for freedom and danger. In 1950, she embarks on a Great Circle flight, circumnavigating the globe. It is Marian’s life dream and her final journey. She crash lands in to the Antarctic ice and is never seen again. Half a century later, Hadley Baxter, a traumatised actor beset by scandal, is irresistibly drawn to play Marian Graves in her biopic, a role that will lead her to probe the deepest mysteries of the vanished pilot's life. GREAT CIRCLE is an enthralling drama of struggle and submission, and of lives lived on the edge: two defiant women in search of an undefinable freedom, whatever the cost. Maggie Shipstead has delivered an epic of extraordinary depth and beauty, that marks her as one of the greatest storytellers of our time.

Charles Foster

Sunday 26th - 10.30

Greyhounds, 23-25 Sheep Street

The Screaming Sky: The Screaming Sky has tells the story of the Common Swift. As you read about the euphoria of their Springtime arrival you become quickly aware that these birds are Charles Foster's joy and obsession, not just birds - indeed - anything is not 'just' anything. The Screaming Sky is a radical engagement with the infinite complexity of a species. Foster invites us to step back, look to the skies, and stand in awe of these magnificent birds as they travel over the cliff tops of Southern Spain and mingle with worshippers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Hermione Lee

Sunday 26th - 11.00

Nell Gwyn Room @ Cotswold Glass &Crafts

Tom Stoppard: A Life: The biography of our greatest living playwright, by one of the leading literary biographers in the English-speaking world, a star in her own right, Hermione Lee. With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg, Hermione Lee builds a meticulously researched portrait of one of our greatest playwrights.

Ken Worpole

Sunday 26th - 12.00

The Highway Inn

No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: In 1943 a group of pacifists took possession of a vacant farm in Frating on the Essex Peninsula. There, they established a working community, inspired by their association with The Adelphi Journal where D.H. Lawrence, Vera Brittain, Iris Murdoch, George Orwell and many others had shared their ideas. Over time it became a successful arable and livestock farm. Together with photographs, letters and records, social historian, Ken Worpole has written a kaleidoscopic history and an enquiry into the religious and political ideals of the back-to-the-land movement in post war rural England.

New Statesman Editor, Jason Cowley says:

'Worpole is a literary original, a social and architectural historian whose books combine the Orwellian ideal of common decency with an understated erudition.'

Hermione Lee with Kate Kennedy

Sunday 26th - 13.00

Nell Gwyn Room @ Cotswold Glass & Crafts

Lives of Houses: What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? In Lives of Houses, a group of notable biographers, historians, critics, and poets explores these questions and more through fascinating essays on the houses of great writers, artists, composers, and politicians of the past. With more than forty illustrations, Lives of Houses illuminates what houses mean to us and how we use them to connect to and think about the past. The result is a fresh and engaging look at house and home

Sathnam Sanghera

Sunday 26th - 13.30

New Hall @ Warwick Hal

Empireland: In his brilliantly illuminating book Sathnam Sanghera demonstrates how so much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in our imperial past. In prose that is, at once, both clear-eyed and full of acerbic wit, Sanghera shows how our past is everywhere: from how we live to how we think, from the foundation of the NHS to the nature of our racism, from our distrust of intellectuals in public life to the exceptionalism that imbued the campaign for Brexit and the government's early response to the Covid crisis. And yet empire is a subject, weirdly hidden from view.

Fiona Sampson

Sunday 26th - 14.00

Greening Room @ Warwick Hall

Two-Way Mirror: 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways', Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote, shortly before defying her family by running away to Italy with Robert Browning. But behind the romance of her extraordinary life stands a thoroughly modern figure, who remains an electrifying study in self-invention. Drawing on recent archival discoveries, Sampson’s meticulously researched and beautifully constructed biography of Britain’s most revered female poet reveals a self-possessed Victorian woman ahead of her time both in her remarkable talent and the manner in which she lived her life. 

Deborah Moggach

Sunday 26th - 16.30

Old Hall @ Warwick

A Writers Life: Deborah Moggach is the author of nineteen successful novels including the bestselling Tulip Fever. In 2012, her novel These Foolish Things was adapted for the screen under the title The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and starred Judi Dench, Dev Patel, Bill Nighy and Maggie Smith. An award-winning screenwriter, she won a Writers' Guild Award for her adaptation of Anne Fine's Goggle-Eyes and her screenplay for the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was nominated for a BAFTA. Her television screenwriting credits include the acclaimed adaptations of her own novels Close Relations and Final Demand, as well as Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate and The Diary of Anne Frank. Deborah has been Chairman of the Society of Authors and worked for PEN's Executive Committee. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was appointed an OBE in the 2018 New Year's Honours List for services to literature and drama.

Freya Johnston

Sunday 26th - 16.30

The Highway Inn

Jane Austen, Early and Late: Freya Johnston is University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in English at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She is the co-editor of Jane Austen’s Teenage Writings and the author of Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709–1791. A re-examination of Austen's unpublished writings that uncovers their continuity with her celebrated novels and challenges the distinctions between her "early" and "late" work. Jane Austen, Early and Late offers a new picture of the author in all her complexity and ambiguity, and shows us that it is not necessarily true that early work yields to later, better things.

Peter Salmon

Sunday 26th - 16.30

Gauntlet Room @ Warwick Hall

An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida: Peter Salmon is an Australian writer living in the UK. His first novel, The Coffee Story was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He has written frequently for Australian TV and radio, and for broadsheets including The Guardian and the Sydney Review of Books. His latest biography of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times.

Fiona Sampson, Kate Kennedy and Sue Leigh: An Evening of Poetry

Sunday 26th - 19.00

Lenthall Chapel @ Burford Priory

Sampson’s poems shimmer between the human perspective and what is beyond – some larger, longer-term consciousness. Language runs and dances over the stuff of the human body and the material of the landscape. And yet, despite these radical perspective shifts, the collection keeps in sight, always, the human experience: the act of creation; the way in which childhood memory and family lore impinge on the present. ‘Come Down’ has been shortlisted for the prestigious Wales Book of the Year 2021. Kate Kennedy’s recent publication, Dweller In Shadows, A Life of Ivor Gurney is the first comprehensive biography of this extraordinary English poet and composer has received praise from Simon Heffer, The Literary Review, UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and the Chairman of the Ivor Gurney Society. Sue Leigh’s first collection of poems, Chosen Hill, published by Two Rivers Press, came out in 2018. She has won the BBC Proms Poetry Competition and Carol Ann Duffy’s Shore to Shore competition and her work has been published widely in magazines and journals including the TLS, Areté, California Quarterly and Oxford Magazine.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Clover Stroud

Monday 27th - 11.00

Greyhounds, 23-25 Sheep Street

My Wild and Sleepless Nights, A Mother’s Story: Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like - how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be. My Wild and Sleepless Nights examines what it means to be a mother, and reveals with unflinching honesty the many conflicting emotions that this entails: the joy and the wonder, the loneliness and despair.

Nick Kary

Monday 27th - 11.00

Nell Gwyn Room @ Cotswold Glass & Crafts

Making and the Art of Transformation: Nick Kary has spent a lifetime making, teaching, and writing. Over the past 35 years he has developed his skill set as a craftsman and designer of fine furniture from workshops in London, Mexico and Devon, for clients including Terence Conran, Madonna and Elton John. Through beautifully crafted writing filled with memorable makers, landscapes, stories and scenery, Material is a rich celebration of what it means to imagine and create. Nick Kary champions the voices of artisans across the English landscape, from potters to woodworkers, and reminds us of the rich vein of knowledge and skills that defines our common human heritage.

Madeleine Bunting

Monday 27th - 12.30

Greyhounds, 23-25 Sheep Street

Labours of Love, The Crisis of Care: Madeleine Clare J. Bunting was formerly an associate editor and columnist at The Guardian newspaper. She has written five works of non-fiction and two novels. She is a regular broadcaster for the BBC. Heartfelt and humane, Labours of Love traces Madeleine Bunting’s journey around the country investigating the current, parlous state of the care system through candid and powerful testimony from doctors, social workers, palliative care teams and many others.
Labours of Love was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford 2020 and has been shortlisted for The Orwell Prize 2021

Kate MacDougall

Monday 27th - 14.00

Greyhounds, 23-25 Sheep Street

The No. 1 London Dog-Walking Agency: Kate MacDougall is a writer and journalist who now lives in rural Oxfordshire with her family. She writes features for publications including Country Life, the Telegraph, Horse & Hound, Homes & Antiques whilst also wrangling three small children and two disobedient dogs. The No. 1 London Dog-Walking Agency is an irresistibly charming memoir of a young woman who started her own business as a dog walker for London’s busy, well-heeled dog lovers. A true love letter to London, dogs, and growing up. 

Nicola Cornick

Monday 27th - 16.00

Greyhounds, 23-25 Sheep Street

The Last Daughter, takes readers from the present day to the Wars of the Roses in the 1400s, and with an enthralling mystery at its heart, The Last Daughter is a spellbinding novel about family secrets, perfect for fans of Lucinda Riley, Victoria Hislop and Kate Morton. Nicola will be introducing us to her fascination with the mystery of Richard III and the princes in the tower.