Book Festival Director’s Welcome
Victoria Dawson
Hear for yourselves unique storytelling, challenging ideas and deep personal experience from the serious to the (slightly) frivolous. All by way of frostbite, positive thinking and public service.
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Book Festival Director’s Welcome
Victoria Dawson
Hear for yourselves unique storytelling, challenging ideas and deep personal experience from the serious to the (slightly) frivolous. All by way of frostbite, positive thinking and public service.
It is of great pride to me that one of the themes of this year’s Festival is extraordinary women, not just as the subject of events but in their participation. Diane Abbott has been a member of Parliament since 1987. She now enjoys the title, The Mother of the House as the longest continuously serving female MP and yet during that service has received an unacceptable barrage of vicious social and print media criticism. Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey grew up in care but through a stellar list of public appointments, arts management and academia , gained a seat in the House of Lords in 2004 as one of the first Black female life peers. Sarah Rainsford is ‘an Exceptional and fearless’ BBC correspondent who has reported from Russia, Ukraine, Spain, Turkey, Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2021 she was expelled by the Russian government as part of retaliatory actions over news coverage. Truly Champion Women will grace our stage this July.
One may argue about the most pressing issues of the day, but surely in the provision of care for the elderly, the hypothetical becomes the personal for many. David Goodhart’s The Care Dilemma argues that we need a new policy statement which supports equality while valuing community and the family. Roger Clough, former professor of social care describes his own Oldenland, “as my companion, my shadow and confederate, maybe my friend’ and considers ‘how do I navigate a good older age?’ Masud Husain is both an internationally eminent neurologist and a master storyteller. How does the brain make us who we are and act in the ways we do? Sumit Paul-Choudhury is an astrophysicist-turned-journalist and former editor-in-chief of New Scientist magazine. Despite losing his wife to an aggressive form of ovarian cancer, he describes himself as an optimist and in his new book The Bright Side describes with wit and empathy how positive thinkers, however irrational, have an evolutionary advantage.
Jeremy Hunt served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2022 to 2024 and Foreign Secretary from 2018 to 2019. Jeremy will be with us to discuss Britain’s place in the world in a book that promises to be ‘neither tub-thumpingly nationalistic nor pessimistically declinist’.
Erling Kagge is a man who has conquered the extremes of our planet with a positive personal philosophy. The first man to have reached the North Pole, South Pole and the summit of Everest on foot, Erling is a Norwegian lawyer, entrepreneur and politician. We are delighted to be bringing him from Oslo to Buxton to hear about his new book, North Pole: The History of an Obsession.
