Young Lit Fix By Antonia Squire

Award-winning nature writer James Rebanks is the final speaker at Bridport Literary Festival this year.

In an addition to the published programme, festival director Tanya Bruce-Lockhart managed to persuade him down from Cumbria just days after Rebanks won the prestigious Wainwright Prize for his book English Pastoral: An Inheritance.

The event at The Electric Palace, Bridport, at 7.30pm on Saturday 13 November looks set to be popular. He’ll be in conversation with Elizabeth Wainwright.

The story of Rebanks’s family farm in the Cumbrian Fells was praised by the Wainwright Prize judges as a ‘seminal work which will still be celebrated in 50 years.’ The award is named after writer and fell walker Alfred Wainwright. It goes to the book that ‘most successfully inspires readers to explore the outdoors and to nurture a respect for the natural world.’

The award comes at a time when interest in nature writing is at its highest. Natural history sales totalled £2.8 million July and August, according to Nielsen BookScan, up 21% on the same period last year and 31% on 2019.

A very personal book, English Pastoral should appeal to farmers and anyone who lives and works the land. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost.

Rebanks, who wrote the award winning The Shepherd’s Life, is doing his best to restore the life that had vanished, to leave a legacy for the future for our green and pleasant land. His book is one of hope, what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.

TV doctor Hilary Jones launches historical epic

Dr Hilary Jones is probably Britain’s best known GP. His long career in television and radio has made him a household name.

His voice has that calm, reassuring bedside manner that reaches the parts other broadcasting doctors cannot reach.

And now Dr Hilary Jones has found his writing voice, launching his epic historical series which is set in the midst of a pandemic rather appropriately in the midst of a pandemic.

He’ll be at BridLit in conversation with Sally Laverack on Thursday 11 November at the Bull Ballroom at 10am.

They’ll be talking about Frontline, a sweeping sumptuous World War I medical drama set during the Spanish Flu pandemic, when only the strongest survived.

The pandemic killed an estimated 50 million people, with the mortality rate higher in the 20-40s age range and those below five and over 65.

Frontline is the first book in a series charting the rise of a prominent British medical family in the twentieth century. From wars to a pandemic, the discovery of penicillin to the birth of the NHS, successive generations of the Burnett family are at the vanguard of life-saving developments in medicine.

Dr Hilary’s debut novel focuses on aristocrat’s daughter Grace, a nurse, and Will, a young soldier, who meet in a field hospital in France. Rumours of Armistice abound but hopes of peace are threatened by the deadly virus.

At BridLit, Dr Hilary will be discussing the challenges posed by writing romantic fiction and plotting the course of a family saga across the 20th century. Are there parallels with Covid 19, which has affected global well-being?