Tickets are £5 plus a small booking fee, £5 of the ticket will go toward a book on the day.

Join garden and cookery writers and fiction authors to hear why the natural world is so important to their work and to celebrate the range and wealth of nature writing today.

Celia Rees has written over twenty books for young adults, recently changing her focus to adult fiction. In her hugely popular Witch Child and its sequel Sorceress, she explores healers, both European and Native American, and their use of herbs and plants in medicine. Her first adult novel, Miss Graham’s War, centres around a cookery book and the use of recipes as a way of sending coded messages between women.

Jane Rogers has published ten novels, two collections of stories, and written and adapted drama for TV and radio. She is passionate about the natural world and her more recent fiction sets out to explore what life on earth may be like in the future. Her latest collection, Fire-Ready, looks at present and future aspects of the climate emergency. Five of these have recently been broadcast on Book at Bedtime.

Kathy Slack left London life and a career in advertising after suffering burnout and depression. A move to the Cotswolds led to training as a chef, growing vegetables and creating recipes. She is now a designer, cookery teacher at schools and festivals, photographer and award-winning food writer. Her two books are From the Veg Patch and her latest, Rough Patch. She has a regular slot on BBC Radio Oxford.

Linda Newbery writes fiction for adults and young readers, with titles including Lob, inspired by the Edward Thomas poem of that name, and Set in Stone, a Costa Prize category winner. Her latest adult novel, The One True Thing, illustrates the transforming power of gardening and immersion in the natural world. With Celia Rees and Adèle Geras, Linda hosts the literary blog Writers Review.

Claire Cox is a poet, poetry editor, critic and publisher. Her engagement with nature is lifelong, but her environmental concerns have been sharpened through extensive doctoral research for her latest book The Poetry of Disaster: Chernobyl, Katrina, and the Anthropocene. Here, issues around man-made industrial disasters, the consequences of extreme weather events, melting Arctic ice, and how we might respond to these through our own writings are explored in depth.