Blog Posts

  • A Richard Mabey interview to remember

    A Richard Mabey interview to remember

    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 were still talking about it long afterwards, and as it turned out even the nature-writing master himself was struck by what had happened in that small but…

  • Encouraging rural voices of the future

    Encouraging rural voices of the future

    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 imagine. The young people – who are aged 12 and on upwards – then return to Wells Maltings to write and discuss…

  • Watch again: John Mullan interviews Alan Hollinghurst

    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…

  • What did you think?

    What did you think?

    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…

  • Storm Amy visits Literature & Landscape

    Storm Amy visits Literature & Landscape

    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…