North Norfolk Festival of Literature and Landscape Q&A
July 25, 2024 | Things to do | 7 minute read
The North Norfolk Festival of Literature and Landscape is set to take place at Wells Maltings and the local area in October 2024. The festival celebrates “the unique landscapes of North Norfolk and the British Isles with a weekend festival of the arts – including poetry and prose, readings and discussions, workshops for children and adults, exhibitions and field trips.” The Countess of Leicester is a patron of the festival, and our Conservation Manager, Jake Fiennes, is also running talks. We spoke with Vicky Rangeley-Wilson, one of the key organisers, about what can be expected and how you can get involved.
Tell us more about North Norfolk Festival of Literature and Landscape – what can be expected?
Over a dozen celebrated writers, artists and conservationists will flock to Wells Maltings for a weekend of discussions, readings, river and salt-marsh walks and an exhibition of woodcuts, landscape paintings and world-class photography. Robert Macfarlane, Alice Oswald, Tony Juniper, Rachel Hore, Matthew Hollis, Mark Cocker and the BBC’s Joe Crowley are just some of the people you will be able to listen to in discussion, to question and connect with from Friday 4th to Sunday 6th of October. When days will be shorter than nights, fresh air and exercise will be in shrinking supply and long hours lie ahead for curling up with a book, what could be better?
© James Cockburn, pine woods at Holme-next-the-Sea
What is Literature and Landscape all about?
The festival is a on of the amazing landscape we live in and the power of our imaginations to connect with it. We hope to inspire, inform and encourage one another to engage with nature in practical and creative ways. Although we are most of all a festival about poems, stories, reading, observing and inventing, we also want to share some of the pioneering landscape recovery work that has been going on in North Norfolk, which has brought nature surging back in places compromised by centuries of human intervention, and we hope to stimulate discussions between people who live, work, play in, visit and care about the land, sea and wildlife. We would love to remind people of all ages to pick up a book they like, get out into the natural world, get creative and connect with what they see. All these activities have been shown by recent studies to be great for our mental health – which is of course just another way of saying that they are uplifting and fun.
© James Cockburn – Margins and Edges – looking north from Burnham Market Road
What inspired you to get involved in this project?
Jim Ring – the director of Sea Fever – was stepping back after five years of sterling work keeping the festival going through Covid. While helping from the sidelines I saw how well he had done to lure great talent to a place where half the catchment population is flatfish, crabs and seagulls.
No wonder Wells is on the list of places for levelling up for culture! We plan to keep up the push. We also reasoned that while at times Wells can feel far away from centres of cultural activity, we have a rich supply of wildlife, bird life, chalk hills and streams, dunes, cliffs, marshes and a long history of conservation – and in these respects North Norfolk is a different kind of hub. This is where to come if you want to be inspired by nature.
As its custodians, local people have a lot to say, and by listening to visiting writers we hope people will be fired up to read and write more.
My husband Charles is a river conservationist and artist; we both write and have taught, and our daughter is an author of children’s books, so we are particularly fired up about encouraging children to love reading. Charles’s family comes from this coast, he grew up partly here in the same house as our two children, so we are passionate about books, art, landscape and this landscape in particular.
© James Cockburn – River Stiffkey from Warham Camp
What is the connection between Holkham and the festival?
Jake Fiennes
How can the public get involved with the festival?
Our programme will be released to the general public on 1st July. If you fancy coming on a walk or three, connecting with a discussion, attuning your naturalist’s skills or developing your poetry-writing technique please take a look at our website literatureandlandscape.org. You’ll find out all about our contributors, and you can follow links from the programme page to the Maltings site for tickets. For anyone who would like to support our community aims further – encouraging literacy and creativity; helping to put North Norfolk on the cultural map; fostering practical and imaginative engagement with the natural world, and enabling a respectful exchange of ideas around conservation and food production – please look at our Friends page. If you sign up as a Friend you can buy tickets from 1st July at a 10% discount and you’ll be invited to drinks at the opening of our exhibition on Friday 4th October. For the rest of the weekend, the exhibition will be free to visitors whenever the Maltings is open. Please drop in to see some beautiful woodcuts about rivers, fish and angling; a collection of colourful landscape paintings of North Norfolk, and stunning images of chalk streams by National Geographic’s favourite photographer.
Find out more and book tickets here.
What sort of audience are you expecting?
On schools’ Friday we are expecting over 200 local pupils to join us for talks and creative writing workshops. Over the rest of the weekend local audiences will enjoy readings and chat about novels set in this area, and at many events we hope to see also farmers, birdwatchers, anglers, wildfowlers and visitors too. We hope to attract good and varied from anyone interested in creative techniques for boosting wildlife habitats to anyone who wants to apply their creativity to describing nature and the places they love. And really anyone who likes a good read or an enjoys a thought-provoking discussion.
