Nick Acheson is a Norfolk native, four generations of whose family are buried in Blakeney churchyard. Having watched birds at Cley each week through the late 1980s and 1990s, he is still deeply rooted in the salt, the scrapes and the shingle of this blessed stretch of the North Norfolk coast. In his book This Wild Dream, celebrating Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s centenary this year, he tells the story of a century of creative wildlife conservation at Cley and beyond. Join him for a walk and talk on Cley, its people, its wildlife and its future.
John Andrews is an angling historian and writer and an antiques dealer specialising in antique fishing tackle. His 2002 memoir For All Those Left Behind was shortlisted for a number of awards and can still be found in the odd back water. John writes for Fallon’s Angler, Classic Angling and Caught by the River and has worked as MC for twenty years at festivals and shows including Port Eliot, No. 6 Festival, The Good Life Experience, and the Caught by the River Day Out at Kingston. John co-hosts the books tent at The Wake, a woodland festival in Sussex set up by the founders of Green Man.
Mona Arshi worked as a human rights lawyer before studying poetry at the University of East Anglia. Mona’s award-winning poetry explores memory, language, landscape, belonging and what it means to be voiceless – often in conversation with myths and the natural world. Her debut collection, Small Hands, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and her first novel was shortlisted for prizes including the Desmond Eliot award. A former writer-in-residence at NWT Cley Marshes, Mona has drawn lasting inspiration from Norfolk’s birds, salt marshes and coastal landscapes. She co-edited Nature Matters with Karen McCarthy Woolf.
American-born Daphne Warburg Astor (1949–2024) made a significant contribution to British arts over four decades naturalised here, founding Hazel Press, instigating Poetry in Aldeburgh, and playing an active role in establishing the Cambridge Literary Festival. Her vision and generosity continue to inspire those whose lives she touched. Daphne’s profound attentiveness to nature and place and to our connections with each are reflected in her poetry. We are delighted to have the distinction of launching her only collection, Honour, and to welcome firm friends from the arts world who will introduce Daphne’s work on her behalf.
Patrick Barkham has been writing about natural history for the Guardian for over 20 years, and is one of the UK’s most eloquent nature chroniclers from a generation of British authors who revitalised British nature writing. His books blend environmental reporting with personal reflection and political insight and include The Butterfly Isles, Badgerlands, Islander, Coastlines, Wild Child and The Swimmer – a biography of Roger Deakin. Patrick has been shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Wainwright Prize. He was born in Norfolk, where he lives with his family, and is President of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. Patrick leads our Wells Young Writers Group.
Dame Gillian Beer is a former King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and President of Clare Hall, and one of Britain’s most important literary critics of the past 60 years. Her books on Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf and Victorian literature have rewritten our understanding of the relationships between literature, science and the natural world. A valued patron of our predecessor festival Sea Fever, Gillian joins us to reflect on the poetry and legacy of her friend Daphne Astor.
Andrew Bloomfield was born and brought up on the Holkham National Nature Reserve, where he developed a lifelong passion for the natural world. His observations led to Britain’s first published paper on the ecology and behaviour of spoonbills, a subject on which he has lectured across the UK and internationally. His latest book, Wetland Wings: The History of Holkham Marsh and its Birds, was published in July. Proud of his Norfolk roots, Andrew has travelled widely in search of wildlife, from gorillas in Uganda to tigers in India, yet still considers dawn on the North Norfolk coast among his most memorable wildlife experiences.
Mark Cocker‘s writing brings together encyclopaedic knowledge and research, a passion for all wildlife and naturalist’s eye for detail with a thought-provoking creative approach. Mark has contributed to the Guardian Country Diary for 37 years. Many of his books have been shortlisted for prestigious prizes. Birds Britannica, A Claxton Diary and Crow Country won BTO Book of the Year, East Anglian Book of the Year and the New Angle Award while Birds and People (2013) was recognised by The Times in April this year as one of the 25 best non-fiction books of the 21st century. Mark’s much-anticipated book The Nature of Seeing will be published in October.
Jon Cook is a writer and critic. He has published academic work on romanticism, literary theory, and poetics and has written reviews and essays in various newspapers and magazines. His published books include Romanticism and Ideology, a biographical work, Hazlitt in Love, and Poetry in Theory. He has taught at universities in the United States, Europe and India. He has been appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. From 2008-2017 he was on the board of Arts Council, England. He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Literature at UEA.
Perhaps best known for TV series such as Town and the BAFTA-winning Coast, Nicholas Crane received the Stanfords Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing in 2024. After walking, cycling or riding horseback across Great Britain, Europe, Tibet, China, Afghanistan and Africa, over deserts and mountain ranges he received a Mungo Park Medal. He later became president of the Royal Geographical Society. His latest book, The Path More Travelled walks Britain’s footpath networks while narrating 12,000 years of landscape history. Nicholas grew up in Norfolk where he discovered his love of exploration and bicycles.
Geoff Dyer is one of Britain’s best-known writers. His books are as wide-ranging as they are emotionally and intellectually engaging, surprising and humorous. Alongside novels he has written about photography, cinema, jazz and literature; about life on board an aircraft carrier, what it’s like to be at the Burning Man Festival, and, in his most recent book, Homework, his childhood and adolescence in Cheltenham. His writing is deeply attuned to the special atmospheres of time and place, no more so than in this meticulous memoir. Geoff has received numerous literary awards and recently returned to London after a period of living in Los Angeles.
Alastair Fothergill has spent 40 years filming wildlife around the world. He is behind five of the top-10-grossing natural-history cinema films of all time and has worked with David Attenborough more than any other living producer. After running BBC Bristol’s Natural History unit he founded Silverback Films, and made series for Netflix and Disney. His many awards include four Emmys and a Royal Geographic Society medal. Alastair is a Fellow of the Royal Television Society and has an OBE and honorary doctorates from four universities. He is the author of eight books and lives in Bristol.
One of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists, Maggi Hambling CBE is renowned for her fearless exploration of life, death, and the natural world. A good friend of Daphne Astor, she shared Daphne’s passion for the East Anglian coast. Hambling’s public sculpture includes Scallop on the beach at Aldeburgh, for Benjamin Britten.
With work held in museum collections from the Met in New York to CAFA in Beijing, Maggi is one of the UK’s most significant and proactive cultural figures.
Born and raised in New York, having lived in Dublin and London, now based in Suffolk, Eileen Haring Woods is a conceptual artist, curator, producer and film maker. From a background in art, music, theatre, film, design and production she has worked with international creative legends and leaders, artists, scientists and environmental organisations to produce interdisciplinary live events, exhibitions, research projects and festivals. A close friend and collaborator with Daphne Astor, she co-produced and edited Daphne’s film-poem Honour which will be screened at the launch.
Born in Norwich, Matthew Hollis is an award-winning poet, biographer, the former poetry editor at Faber & Faber for many years and our patron. His Costa Prize-winning biography Now All Roads Lead to France was followed by the acclaimed poetry collection Earth House, and last year he co-edited the definitive collection of The Poems of Seamus Heaney. A long-standing patron of this festival, Matthew will chair this year’s closing event in honour of his friend Daphne whose collection he edited.
Luke Jennings is an author best known for the Killing Eve novels that inspired the award-winning TV series. A lifelong fascination with what goes on beneath the surface of rivers and lakes led to Blood Knots – Luke’s memoir of inspirational friendship and fly-fishing with an intelligence officer who was later murdered by the IRA. A former dancer and journalist, Luke has written for Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Time and was The Observer’s dance critic. He co-authored The Faber Guide to Ballet, as well as – with his daughter Laura – the Stars children’s fiction series. He lives in London.
Karen McCarthy Woolf has written three poetry collections and a verse novel, winning a Cholmondeley Award, a postdoctoral Fulbright scholarship and Laurel and Jerwood prizes. Her work has been translated into five other languages, produced as dance and animation, and dropped over Parliament from a helicopter. She has edited seven anthologies including Nature Matters – ‘the most important anthology of the year’(The Guardian) co-edited with Mona Arshi. Karen’s new collection, Unsafe is a meditation on the sacred, the city and our access to nature. She lives between London and Edinburgh where she holds a Fellowship at the University.
Zohra Nabi was born in 1998, and grew up inventing stories for her two younger sisters. She studied law at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, but secretly dreamed of being an author. Now she lives in London, browsing bookshops and writing magical adventures. Deep Dark, the first book in the Cassia Thorne mysteries, was The Times’ Children’s Book of the Week, and the second and latest book in the series, Witch Light, was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2026. She grew up coming to Holkham on summer holidays with her grandparents, and is very happy to be back for the Literature and Landscape Festival.
David Profumo’s nature writing ranges from the Scottish Highlands to the Arctic Circle and South Seas. A former Booker-prize judge, and winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his novel Sea Music, David also edited a celbrated anthology of fishing in literature with Graham Swift. David’s first memoir Bringing the House Down (2006) told a history of public family scandal. His second, The Lightning Thread (2021) explored connections between memory, wilderness and the enduring pull of water. David lives in Perthshire and has been Country Life’s fishing correspondent since 1995.
Steven Quincey-Jones grew up on the Dorset coast, and likes writing fishy tales about our tricky relationships with shifting seascapes. His first novel is set on a sinking prehistoric island, and follows the fate of twins, Luna and Oona, as they attempt to evade both the tide, and a sneaky race of shapeshifting sea-beasts known as the Fishfolk. These days he lives back by the coast, in Ramsgate, hatching plans to visit other magical, mythical coastlines. He’s delighted to have such a wonderful excuse to sample the legendary beaches of north Norfolk.
David Sear has researched rivers, lakes, floodplains and coasts for more than 28 years. His pioneering work on sediment management, river restoration and flood risk has shaped policy and practice in the UK and abroad. He collaborates on projects ranging from climate change and human migration in the tropical Pacific islands, natural flood-management approaches, geomorphic impacts of large floods and the impacts of fine sediments on aquatic ecosystems. David appeared on BBC and Channel 4 programmes including Time Team when he uncovered Britain’s lost medieval port at Dunwich.
Stephen Temple is an award-winning fourth-generation Norfolk farmer with a PhD in agricultural engineering who spent 20 years researching innovative farming techniques in Malawi and applied that knowledge to create an award-winning regenerative-farming business back home, protecting the climate, the soil and his local chalk stream. Waste products from one enterprise on the farm are recycled as raw materials for another, and generate electricity and heat that supply farm operations, an artisan dairy business, the farmhouse and cottages as well as providing reduced-cost green energy for the local community.
