Artists for Earlybird events – full line-up released on 18th March

William Atkins

William AtkinsSaturday 11th June: Extremes of exploration – flight, mountains, jungle, desert (with James Macdonald Lockhart and Andrea Wulf)

William Atkins is the author of The Moor (Faber), a book about English moorland, which was described in the Observer as a ‘classic’ and as a ‘remarkable book’ by John Carey in the Sunday Times.

He is working on a travel book and cultural history about the world’s deserts, to be published internationally in 2018. He is a 2016 Eccles British Library Writer in Residence.

Caught By The River

Caught By The River Friday 10th June: Live Music

Jeff Barrett of Caught by the River presents music which evokes for the audience a way of being in the sound world of our writers.

Stephanie Cross

Stephanie CrossSunday 12th June: Deep into the English Eerie

Stephanie Cross is a journalist, critic and ghostwriter. She studied English at Emmanuel and Selwyn Colleges, Cambridge, and reviews regularly for the Daily Mail and Observer. She is also a frequent contributor to BBC Countryfile magazine.

Inua Ellams

Inua EllamsSaturday 4th June: The Midnight Run

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a cross art form practitioner, a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer and founder of the Midnight Run — an international, arts-filled, night-time, playful, urban, walking experience.

He is a Complete Works poet alumni and a designer at White Space Creative Agency.

Across his work, Identity, Displacement & Destiny are reoccurring themes in which he also tries to mix the old with the new: traditional african storytelling with contemporary poetry, pencil with pixel, texture with vector images.

His three books of poetry are published by Flipped Eye and Akashic Books, and several plays by Oberon.

Andrew Michael Hurley

Andrew Micheal HurleySunday 12th June: Deep into the English Eerie

Andrew Michael Hurley has lived in Manchester and London, and is now based in Lancashire, where he teaches English Literature and Creative Writing. He has had two collections of short stories published by Lime Tree Press. The Loney is his first novel – it was first published in October 2014 by Tartarus Press, a tiny independent publisher based in Yorkshire, as a 300-copy limited-edition.

James Macdonald Lockhart

James Macdonald LockhartSaturday 11th June: Extremes of exploration – flight, mountains, jungle, desert (with Will Atkins and Andrea Wulf)

James Macdonald Lockhart’s book RAPTOR (Fourth Estate) documents a series of journeys in search of each of Britain’s breeding birds of prey, from Scotland’s mighty eagles to the tiny merlin.

Lockhart is an associate editor of and regular contributor to Archipelago magazine. RAPTOR is his first book and it received a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction in 2011.

Nina Lyon

Sunday 12th June: Excavating the myth of the Green Man (with Robert Macfarlane and China Miéville)

Nina Lyon is the author of Mushroom Season, an account of youthful psychedelic adventures and the mountains near her home which was runner-up for the 2013 FT/Bodley Head Essay Prize, and Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man, which has recently been published by Faber.

She is currently working on another book for Faber about the uncanny and a PhD thesis on nonsense and metaphysics. She lives in the Welsh borders with her children.

Helen Macdonald

Helen MacdonaldFriday 10th June: International Nature Writing

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, and three collections of poetry, including Shaler’s Fish.

Macdonald was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge,  has worked as a professional falconer, and has assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia.  She now writes for the New York Times Magazine.

Rob Macfarlane

Sunday 12th June: Excavating the myth of the Green Man (with Nina Lyon and China Miéville)

Sunday 12th June: Deep into the English Eerie

British academic and travel writer Robert Macfarlane is known for his thought-provoking explorations of the relationship between people and place. He is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks. Mountains of the Mind won the Guardian First Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award and The Wild Places won the Boardman-Tasker Award. Both books have been adapted for television by the BBC. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times. He is currently working on an illustrated children’s book about the natural world in collaboration with illustrator Jackie Morris.

China Miéville

Saturday 11th June: China Miéville skews the picturesque

Sunday 12th June: Excavating the myth of the Green Man (with Nina Lyon and Robert Macfarlane)

‘Over and over again, book after book, Miéville’s mature work forces the reader to ask the question that most writers get to prompt once in a literary lifetime if they’re lucky: what is this new thing we are being shown? Repeatedly, as a writer of the fantastic, he forces a redefinition of what fantasy can be’ – Francis Spufford, The Guardian.

Ruth Potts & Molly Conisbee

Ruth Potts and Molly Conisbee

Saturday 11th June: A Walk Around South West London

Ruth Potts and Molly Conisbee are the co-founders of bread, print and roses, a collective engaged in anarchist baking, seditious pamphleteering and radical walking.

Molly is based Bristol University and is researching the social history of death. Previously Molly worked for the Soil Association, IPPR, nef (the new economics foundation) and in a variety of policy and public affairs roles for the NHS and local government. Molly co-authored (with Andrew Simms) Environmental Refugees – The Case for Recognition and National Gardening Leave – Why working less is good for us all. Molly has also written (with Ruth) on the history and politics of bread, and the social history of the railways.

Ruth initiated (with Gareth Evans), and is an Artistic Advisor to, Utopia 2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility at Somerset House. Previously, Ruth worked at nef where she co-developed a new model of campaign designed to kick-start the decade-long transition to a new economy. She is a co-author (with Andrew Simms) of The New Materialism: How our relationship with the material world can change for the better, covered by the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Financial Times, is a co-author of nef’s Clone Town Britain reports.

Sara Wheeler

ContribPhoto_SaraWheelerFriday 10th June: International Nature Writing

Sara Wheeler is an award-winning non-fiction writer. Her Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, was an international best-seller. She lives in London.

Andrea Wulf

Andrea WulfSaturday 11th June: Extremes of exploration – flight, mountains, jungle, desert (with Will Atkins and James Macdonald Lockhart)

Andrea Wulf is the author of five acclaimed books. The Brother Gardeners won the American Horticultural Society 2010 Book Award and her books Founding Gardeners and The Invention of Nature were on the New York Times Best Seller List. Andrea has written for many newspapers including the Guardian, LA Times, WSJ and New York Times.

She writes a monthly column on the history of science for The Atlantic. In 2014 she co-presented a four-part BBC TV garden series and she appears regularly on radio. The Invention of Nature won the prestigious Costa Biography Award 2015 in the UK, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize 2015, was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non–Fiction 2016 and is shortlisted for the LA Times Book Prize. It was chosen as 10 Best Books of 2015 in the New York Times.