Durham Book Festival 2024 is here!
🥁 Drum roll please... Durham Book Festival 2024 is here! 🥳
From 10–13 October, a starry literary line-up will descend on Durham, with over 35 events at Gala Durham, Clayport Library, and Collected Books.
Choose from history, politics, humour, poetry, philosophy and fiction. Discover new authors and fan over old favourites.
And if you can’t make it in person, you can join in the action via live-stream!
Booking open now at DurhamBookFestival.com
What does the future hold?
What does the future hold? And how can anthropology help us imagine it?
This year, we sat down with six anthropologists at Durham University for six different conversations, inspired by their current research, about what answers we might find.
Listen to this specially-commissioned series below or via your usual podcast app. Transcripts are available to read for each episode.
https://newwritingnorth.com/journal/what-does-the-future-hold/
🥳 Welcome to Durham Book Festival 2023! 📚
🥳 Welcome to Durham Book Festival 2023! 📚
From 13-15 October we're bringing more than 40 brilliant writers and speakers to Durham and online. There's something for everyone, from the history of Durham, to fantastic new fiction, to North East politics, and much more. Join us for a bustling long weekend at Gala Durham, Clayport Library, and Collected Books – or from the comfort of your own home via our live-stream.
Booking open NOW at DurhamBookFestival.com
Thanks to our partners and funders Durham County Council Durham University Arts Council England Gala Durham County Durham Libraries Collected Books Waterstones Durham 🙏
📢Tickets for Durham Book Festival 2022 are now on sale!
Join us in Durham or online this October for four days of events. Between 13 and 16 October, we’re bringing bestselling writers, homegrown talent, and leading thinkers to the Gala Theatre and Clayport Library, and to wherever you are via live-stream. There will also be new films and commissions, the return of the Big Read and Little Read, and the announcement of the Gordon Burn Prize. #DBF22
https://durhambookfestival.com/programme/
It's very nearly halloween 🎃 And we're getting in the spirit 👻 with some witchy poems...
The Durham Witch Project is a sequence of new poetry from our 2021 Durham Book Festival Laureate Fiona Benson, inspired by her research at Durham University's archives 🧙♀️
The rest of the commission is available to read free here: https://durhambookfestival.com/programme/festival-laureates/
#DBF21 #Durham2025 #happyhalloween!
Ideas for Positive Change: Viruses, Biotech and Extreme Enviroments
Presented by Professor Ehmke Pohl (Biosciences)
Biotechnology is used in the production of everyday products ranging from food ingredients, to biofuels. In addition, biotechnology plays an ever increasing role in the pharmaceutical industry with applications ranging from vaccine development to detection of pathogens and the treatment of diseases. Many of the key tools of biotechnology have been discovered from viruses, however not from pathogenic viruses that infect humans but harmless bacteriophages that only infect bacteria.
Today, the vast majority of viruses have not been characterised and due to their genetic diversity, they represent the largest unexplored genetic wealth on the planet. The European Virus-X consortium, which included the Durham team, developed and employed the latest next-generation sequencing technology to discover new viral genes from extreme habitats including Icelandic hot springs and deep-sea hydrothermal vents. From this wealth several hundred gene products, or proteins have been characterised and several enzyme are currently in trials for applications ranging from protein production to the detection of pathogenic viruses including SARS-CoV-2.
https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/ehmke-pohl/
Ideas for Positive Change is a new series of short talks, presented by Durham University academics. Inspired by the success of New Ideas for the New Normal in 2020, a range of world-class researchers return to Durham Book Festival to explore how we might build a more positive future.
https://durhambookfestival.com/programme/event/ideas-for-positive-change/
Ideas for Positive Change: Rethinking Nature Conservation
Presented by Dr Simon P James (Philosophy)
Economists and policymakers say that we should conserve nature because of the various ‘ecosystem services’ it provides. But that is just part of the answer. Much of nature needs conserving for its own sake and not just for ours. And even when it does benefit us humans, nature does not always do so as a service-provider. What is needed, I propose, is an approach to nature conservation that is at once more humane but less human-centred.
Simon James is currently an Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Philosophy. His work engages with a wide range of issues in environmental philosophy, from Buddhist approaches to wildlife conservation to our moral relations with rock formations, and from the (so-called) problem of animal minds to the virtue ethical question of whether a good life must be a green life.
https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/s-p-james/
Ideas for Positive Change is a new series of short talks, presented by Durham University academics. Inspired by the success of New Ideas for the New Normal in 2020, a range of world-class researchers return to Durham Book Festival to explore how we might build a more positive future.
https://durhambookfestival.com/programme/event/ideas-for-positive-change/
Ideas for Positive Change: How to Read Self Help
Presented by Dr Mariann Hardey (Business and Computing)
Mariann Hardey is an Associate Professor at Durham University Business School and part of the Directorate for the Advanced Research Computing (@ARC_DU) group at the University of Durham. Mariann's research examines business and technology. Specifically, tech inequalities through digital identity, professional tech culture, 'women in tech' and interventions in technology. Her work investigates how identity is being transformed by rapid advances in technologies as AI, social media, robotics, biomedicine and robotics change the social and human condition. She advocates, strongly, for inclusivity in tech and to shift away from the label 'women in tech', to enable a step-change in culture, policy and careers. Her current area of research focuses on digital identity through self-tracking and mHealth - particularly those involving automation, data-mining and AI - and the impact on behaviour and body change.
https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/business-staff/mariann-hardey/
Ideas for Positive Change is a new series of short talks, presented by Durham University academics. Inspired by the success of New Ideas for the New Normal in 2020, a range of world-class researchers return to Durham Book Festival to explore how we might build a more positive future.
https://durhambookfestival.com/programme/event/ideas-for-positive-change/
Disability and the Politics of Visibility: Sophie Woolley
Sophie Woolley presents ‘Augmented’, a piece about overcoming the internalised stigma of writing about cochlear implantation to create a remarkable and entertaining solo show about power and the future of humanity. She also touches on her transforming identities over time, her hilarious YouTube series ‘Deaf Faker’, and when she has and hasn’t centred her Deafness.
Sophie Woolley is a writer and performer. In 2019 she set up Augmented Productions, which became an associate company of Told by an Idiot in its inaugural year. She is currently writing for EastEnders.
Stage plays include Augmented, (directed by Rachel Bagshaw and produced by Told by an Idiot), When to Run (produced by renaissanceone) Fight Face and Bee Detective, (directed by Gemma Fairlie and produced by Tin Bath Theatre).
Sophie also writes for Radio. BBC Radio 4 plays include Carbon Cleansing and Absolutely Delish (Grazing episode). Her fiction has been published in Tell Tales Volume 4, One for the Trouble, New Writing 12, Shoreditch Twat zine and Sleazenation magazine.
Current work includes EastEnders and her new short film, Best in Lockdown, a collaboration with Dudley Rees and Told by an Idiot.
Disability and the Politics of Visibility: Steph Robson/Hello Little Lady
The artist, Hello Little Lady, invites you into a stream of consciousness that attempts to make sense of the conflicting narratives she faces while navigating the prejudice, indifference and intolerance from everyday stares, sniggers and sneers she experiences as a visibly disabled person with a rare form of Dwarfism.
The confusion felt from being simultaneously seen as disabled or Dwarf, yet equally dismissed when she embraces each identity. Highlighting her sense of overwhelm from society’s expectation to provide resolutions for every challenge presented. Wondering when her lived experiences and practice will be given the space and place to be visible. She asks you – how will you challenge the notion of how disabled people are seen and heard today?
This piece includes a derogative term to describe Dwarfism that some viewers may find upsetting.
The photo shows the reflection of Hello Little Lady’s forehead with sunglasses perched on the top of her head, in a bathroom mirror that is too high, staring directly at the tap and grey tiles behind it. You wouldn’t make a fuss about this if it happened to you all the time… would you?
Steph Robson, aka Hello Little Lady, is an artist and creative practitioner using visual, written, audio and participatory practices to explore the Dwarfism community’s lived experiences. Her debut exhibition ‘You’re Just Little’ in 2018 revealed the obstacles, challenges and societal assumptions Dwarf people face every day.
Steph’s passion is to give a voice and a platform to the Dwarfism community through creative arts. To enable and empower Dwarf people to be in control of how their narratives and stories are published in a world that often ridicules and objectifies their bodies within society.
Her work explores the themes of accessibility, othering and the tensions between disability and society.
Ideas for Positive Change: The Shape of Things
Presented by Professor Janet Stewart
This video, featuring Professor Janet Stewart, discusses the way that Arts and Humanities research can bring about positive change in society.
Professor Stewart holds a Ph.D in German and Sociology from the University of Glasgow. In 1995, she was awarded a Junior Fellowship at the International Research Centre for Cultural Sciences in Vienna and in 1997-1998 she held a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Studentship at the Karl-Eberhardts-Universität Tübingen. Between 1998 and 2013, she was Lecturer and, latterly, Senior Lecturer in German and Film & Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, where she founded a Masters programme in Visual Culture.
Professor Stewart is the author of two monographs, Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos’s Cultural Criticism (2000) and Public Speaking in the City (2009) and has published widely on Austrian and German literature and visual culture, cultural sociology and urban history.
Her current research project develops her interests in modernity and visual culture in a new context, connecting them to the study of energy and, more specifically, petroleum. She is working on a research monograph, ‘Curating Europe’s Oil’, which explores the role that oil plays in twenty-first century cultural memory, and writes a related blog on Energy and Culture. She is also co-editing, with Graeme MacDonald (Warwick) a Routledge Handbook of Energy Humanities.
https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/janet-c-stewart/
Ideas for Positive Change is a new series of short talks, presented by Durham University academics. Inspired by the success of New Ideas for the New Normal in 2020, a range of world-class researchers return to Durham Book Festival to explore how we might build a more positive future.
https://durhambookfestival.com/programme/event/ideas-for-positive-change/
Disability and the Politics of Visibility: Jamie Hale
In a wheelchair, my queerness is erased, I am desexualised. In a wheelchair, my ‘invisible’ impairments are erased, I am tossed to the side titled ‘visible’.
Disabled people are one side of this chasm, or the other, as if it hadn’t been built to divide us. For as long as disabled people break ourselves into those groups, separate ourselves along faultlines designed in the minds of non-disabled people, we are losing. How can we move beyond a division based on ‘visibility’ to acknowledge and develop a solidarity that recognises the complexities, interdependencies, and constantly changing perceptions of ourselves and our community?
Jamie Hale is a queer / crip artist, curator, poet, writer, playwright, actor, facilitator, trainer and director – otherwise known as ‘busy’, ‘interdisciplinary’, or ‘indecisive’.
They create poetry, comedy, scriptwriting, and drama for page, stage, and screen and in Feb 2021 won the Evening Standard Future Theatre Fund Award in Directing/Theatre-Making. Jamie currently works as Artistic Director at CRIPtic – a development and showcasing opportunity for d/Deaf and disabled people across the Arts founded by Jamie in 2019.
They have performed their work at the Barbican, Invisible Fest, Tate Modern, the Southbank Centre and with Graeae theatre company, and have written for publications including the Guardian and Magma. Their pandemic poetry pamphlet, Shield, was published in Jan 2021.
They are also an expert in disability and health and social care policy, working as CEO for Pathfinders Neuromuscular Alliance and as Chair of Lewisham Disabled People’s Commission. Jamie is studying for a Master’s in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Health at UCL.
Ideas for Positive Change: Identifying Future-Proof Science
Presented by Dr Peter Vickers
Identifying Future-Proof Science sets out to identify the scientific ideas that will last forever. Despite numerous twists and turns in the history of science, the book argues that many modern ideas are here to stay, and offers instructions on how to find them. The claims are made concrete via historical illustrations, including the discovery of gill slits in the human embryo in the 1820s, atomic theory in 1916, continental drift 1920-1960, the discovery of the 'missing link' fossil Tiktaalik in 2004, and the modern controversy over the extinction of the dinosaurs. The conclusions are applied to the Covid pandemic, and in particular the question of how the non-expert can identify the scientific ideas that are trustworthy in a world of 'fake news' and information overload.
In 2003 Peter Vickers received a BSc in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of York, followed by an MA (2005) in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Leeds. This led to a PhD in history and philosophy of science (2009), also at Leeds, supervised by Prof. Steven French. The starting point was certain difficulties concerning the representation and reconstruction of inconsistent scientific theories. Gradually he developed a new methodology for analysing debates about inconsistencies in science which he called ‘theory eliminativism’. His book, 'Identifying Future-Proof Science', is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/peter-vickers/
Ideas for Positive Change is a new series of short talks, presented by Durham University academics. Inspired by the success of New Ideas for the New Normal in 2020, a range of world-class researchers return to Durham Book Festival to explore how we might build a more positive future.
https://durhambookfestival.com/programme/event/ideas-for-positive-change/
Little Read 2021: Look Up! | Draw-along with illustrator Dapo Adeola
Durham Book Festival 2021 is proud to present Look Up!, our 2021 Little Read.
Winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2020, Look Up! by Nathan Bryon is a heart-warming picture book about space and the wonder of the natural world. Rocket’s going to be the greatest astronaut, star-catcher, space-traveller that has ever lived! But… first, she needs to convince her big brother Jamal to stop looking down at his phone and start LOOKING UP at the stars. We hope this beautifully illustrated story will inspire you to turn off those screens and enjoy the outside world!
Watch this video for a fun draw-along with illustrator Dapo Adeola.
Disability and the Politics of Visibility: Cheryl Martin
In ‘Sawubona’, Cheryl Martin talks about being a visible minority with a hidden disability, and how she created solo stage shows to bring the voice of someone with lifelong mental health disabilities to the stage [rather than be talked about in shows by those who have to “deal” with people like her], and to let others like her know that their future can be different from their past.
Contains strong language and references to suicide and self-harm.
Cheryl Martin is Co-Artistic Director of Manchester’s black-led literature NPO Commonword and Black Gold Arts Festival, has worked as a poet, playwright and director, and was a former Associate Director, New Writing/New Work at Contact. She was also lucky enough be part of the 2019-2020 British Council Australia INTERSECT programme.
A Manchester Evening News Theatre Award winner as both writer [musical Heart and Soul, Oldham Coliseum Theatre] and director [Iron by Rona Munro, Contact], Cheryl’s solo stage show Alaska featured in 2016’s A Nation’s Theatre, & 2019’s Summerhall Edinburgh Fringe & Wellcome Festival of Minds and Bodies in London.
Her film One Woman, an Unlimited Wellcome Collection Partnership Award, is touring festivals including the Unlimited Festival at the Southbank Centre, Barcelona’s L’Altre Festival, and Edinburgh’s 2021 Summerhall Digital Fringe.
Ideas for Positive Change: Writing Fiction About the Climate Crisis
Presented by Dr Naomi Booth (English Studies)
This talk considers the idea of positive change in relation to writing fiction about the climate crisis. Using the writer’s own experience of novel-writing as a springboard, it explores the complicated relationship that ‘dark genres’—literary genres which aim to elicit negative affects such as anxiety, disgust and horror—have to notions of positive action. Along the way, it considers works of ‘eco-horror’; the potentially escapist pleasures of apocalyptic art forms; and the emergence of ‘climate grief’ and ‘climate pessimism’ as new and ambivalent affective forces.
Naomi Booth is a fiction writer and academic. She completed my PhD research in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Sussex, where she researched the literary history of swooning. This inspired her first work of fiction, The Lost Art of Sinking (2015), an experimental novella about passing out, which was selected for New Writing North’s Read Regional campaign 2017 and won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella 2016. Her first novel, Sealed (2017), is a work of eco-horror, which was shortlisted for the Not the Booker Award 2018. Her second novel, Exit Management (2020), moves between contemporary Britain, and 1940s Budapest, and is described by the Guardian as a "timely and original dissection of class and desperation in Brexit London".
https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/naomi-r-booth/
Ideas for Positive Change is a new series of short talks, presented by Durham University academics. Inspired by the success of New Ideas for the New Normal in 2020, a range of world-class researchers return to Durham Book Festival to explore how we might build a more positive future.
https://durhambookfestival.com/programme/event/ideas-for-positive-change/
Disability and the Politics of Visibility: Dolly Sen
"I want to ask a lot of questions to a world that doesn’t see me when I want to be part of the world, and sees me, a disabled person, just to hate or pity me. It is hard to live or fit into a world that doesn’t love you, that wants to erase you, sometimes wants to hurt you, wants to spit on you. My piece is my comeback to that."
This piece by Dolly Sen, a disabled, working-class, queer artist, is the first in our commissioned series Disability and the Politics of Visibility. More details here: https://durhambookfestival.com/programme/event/disability-and-the-politics-of-visibility-dolly-sen/
⭐️ It's time for #DBF21! ⭐️
Booking is now OPEN for this year's festival, taking place from 9-17 October 2021! We're delighted to present a hybrid programme of both digital and in person events, featuring a range of over 60 exciting author interviews, commissions, films, podcasts and more.
Check out the full programme and book your tickets at DurhamBookFestival.com. We can't wait to see you there! 🥳
#DurhamBookFestival Durham County Council Durham University BBC Radio Newcastle
Metal Music and Viroid Life with Dr Sam Thomas
Clear Skies Ahead with Professor James Baldini
