Literature & Landscape

23/03/2026

A chance to watch and listen again to an extraordinary interview with the greatest influencer of our thinking about nature and our relationship with nature over the past 50 years

We were all rather blown away by this interview last October, when Patrick Barkham quizzed Richard Mabey about his long, ground-breaking and profoundly influential career. Our sell-out audience wer…

08/03/2026

We are thrilled to have held today the fifth of our Wells Young Writers' workshops - run by author Patrick Barkham and sponsored by the Malcolm Bradbury Trust. The Wells teens are a wonderful group, imaginative and observant, and it is a joy to be able to support this nucleus of creative connection.

October 2025 saw the launch of Wells Young Writers’ group – a workshop run by author Patrick Barkham that meets about once a month somewhere in the landscape around Wells to notice and …

12/02/2026

Watch again: John Mullan interviews Alan Hollinghurst

Please take the opportunity to catch up via our Youtube channel with talks you may have missed in 2025. Here is Booker-prize-winning author Alan Hollinghurst discussing Our Evenings last October with John Mullan - UCL professor of literature and regular pundit of all things bookish for the BBC and The Guardian. We asked Alan to talk about settings - not usually his main focus - which led to a fascinating discussion about the rural English backwaters in which many Londoners have their roots and the experience of returning to and escaping from them; also how the places where you started life tend to form an auto-scenery for everything you read. The landscape of Our Evenings has a particular resonance for Hollinghurst, with a poignant and playful twist...

Please take the opportunity to catch up via our Youtube channel with talks you may have missed in 2025. Here is Booker-prize-winning author Alan Hollinghurst discussing Our Evenings last October wi…

10/11/2025

It's been over a month now since our festival in Wells. We hope you had as much fun and as interesting a time as we did: we loved the exhibition and artists, the writers, their books and fascinating careers, and the many, many discussions - formal and informal - that sprang out of such a great mix of people coming together on stage and in the audience over one weekend....

It’s been over a month now since our festival in Wells. We hope you had as much fun and as interesting a time as we did: we loved the exhibition and artists, the writers, their books and fasc…

09/10/2025

Our brave boat trippers launch into the channel at Wells-Next-the-Sea with Nick Groom at the helm to immerse themselves in nature and the elements at the start of Literature & Landscape last Friday - among them Laurel-prize-winning poet of fishermen, traditional boats and the sea, Katrina Porteous

08/10/2025

With six outdoor events from a boat trip to walks through woods or over a salt marsh to - literally - a walk in the park - we watched our plans teetering as Storm Amy and the festival weekend closed in, locked in embrace. Last year had been all sunshine and gloriously filmic early autumn light that made everything glow. Too easy....

With six outdoor events from a boat trip to walks through woods or over a salt marsh to – literally – a walk in the park – we watched our plans teetering as Storm Amy and the fest…

06/10/2025

Local school children were treated to talks from Natasha Hastings and Iona Rangeley in which each child went home with a free book paid for by our wonderful sponsors, as well as creative writing and art workshops from Natasha, James Cockburn and Patrick Barkham

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05/10/2025

We had a great albeit windy weekend of outdoor and indoor talks. treated guests to a guided tour of Holkham Hall, telling us about the influence of Italian art

05/10/2025

12 walkers followed Jake Fiennes yesterday, battling 50mph winds to get to salt marsh and samphire beds in a 3-hour walk that properly engaged with nature and landscape - and returned looking exhilarated

04/10/2025

30/09/2025

Half our events are sold out and a further quarter are not far off - Book your tickets now before it’s too late!

30/09/2025

Tibor Fischer's short story 'Crushed Mexican Spiders' follows a young woman living in Brixton, London, who returns to her flat to find her key no longer works and that someone else is inside living her life. You never find out what is going on, but her sense of displacement is overwhelming, and sometimes it can feel like a lesser version of that when you consider the past - all those people who lived in your house or street or village once, who owned your world and would not recognise you....

Tibor Fischer’s short story ‘Crushed Mexican Spiders’ follows a young woman living in Brixton, London, who returns to her flat to find her key no longer works and that someone els…