Speakers for 2025 are announced and tickets are on sale.
I am delighted to announce that I will be welcoming the following speakers to next year’s Festival of Biblical Literature: Dr Ahreum Kim (University of Cambridge) Rabbi Anna Gerrard (Liberal Jewish Community) I know that those of you who came to the festival last July will be pleased to know that the following speakers will […]
Only two weeks to go!
The festival will start two weeks from today. I am excited by the variety of speakers and performers who will be at the festival. When I was an undergraduate reading Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, I studied the story of King David and his wives as an example of the interminglisn of affairs […]
Hay Festival
Last weekend I was at the Hay book festival in Hay-on-Wye. I attended really interesting talks by people presenting their books on Africa (Zeinab Badawi), Putin’s Russia (Guiliano da Empoli), Meritocracy (Michael Sandel) and the war in the Ukraine (Sofia Cheliak, Sasha Dovzhyk, Olesya Khromeychuk). There were no talks on the most widely read book […]
Cheltenham Poetry Festival
Between 26 and 28 April I was at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. Like the Malvern Festival of Biblical Literature, it is a small festival that manages to attract very well-respected performers/speakers. Don Paterson was at the Cheltenham Festival. He is the only poet to have won the TS Eliot prize twice. I had an opportunity […]
Ealing Book Festival
At the start of April, I was at the Ealing Book Festival. I had been invited, under my nom de plume, James Pendle, to put on a performance of my poems in the elegant Pitzhanger Manor. For videos of the performance, go to my youtube channel JamesPendlePoet https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1n9A-LrtWC1-9zSUy9Rkzw
News about the Festival in The Friend
I was happy to see my letter published in The Friend (a Quaker magazine) on 8 March. Here is an excerpt: “There may be parts of the Bible that seem immoral or just irrelevant, but it is integral to the cultural heritage of many lands and peoples and so it has the potential to bring […]