Penarth Literary Festival Line-up 2023
REVEREND RICHARD COLES is a writer, broadcaster and Anglican priest. He co-presented Saturday Live on BBC Radio 4 and appears, from time to time, on QI, Have I Got News For You and Would I Lie To You? He writes regularly for the Sunday Times, and is the author of half a dozen books, including a bestselling autobiography, Fathomless Riches, and the bereavement bestseller The Madness of Grief, after the death of his partner, David Coles. Murder Before Evensong, the first book in the Canon Clement Mystery series, was an instant number 1 Sunday Times bestseller.
DIANA EVANS is the author of the novels 26a, The Wonder and Ordinary People. She has received nominations for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book and the Commonwealth Best First Book awards and was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. Ordinary People won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and also received a nomination for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction. Her journalism appears in Time magazine, the Guardian, Vogue and the Financial Times. She lives in London.
JON GOWER has over forty books to his name, in Welsh and English, including The Turning Tide: A Biography of the Irish Sea, and Y Diwedd, which completes his Welsh language crime trilogy. He is also the author of The Story of Wales which accompanied the landmark BBC series, An Island Called Smith which gained the John Morgan Travel Writing Award, and Y Storïwr which won the Wales Book of the Year award. Jon is a former BBC Wales arts and media correspondent who lives in Cardiff, where he is currently writing a book about the American footballer Raymond Chester.
JOHN PATRICK GREEN is a human with the human job of making books about animals with human jobs, notably the smash-hit graphic novel series InvestiGators. John is definitely a multiple New York Times-bestselling human author and not just a bunch of animals in a trench coat pretending to have a human job. With over a million copies of InvestiGators in print, John is a successful human being with only two hands and a normal amount of fur. He lives in a Brooklyn apartment that doesn't allow animals other than the ones living in his head.
NATALIE HAYNES is a writer and broadcaster and – according to the Washington Post – a rock star mythologist. Her first novel, The Amber Fury, was published to great acclaim, as was her previous book, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life. Her second novel, The Children of Jocasta, was published in 2017 and her retelling of the Trojan War, A Thousand Ships was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020. Natalie’s most recent non-fiction book, Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myth, reached number 2 in the New York Times Bestseller chart. Her novel about Medusa, Stone Blind, was published in September last year and Margaret Atwood liked it. So did Neil Gaiman. She writes for the Guardian and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4: eight series of her show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics, have been broadcast on Radio 4. Series nine will be released in 2023.
LIZZIE HUXLEY-JONES (they/them) is an autistic author and editor based in South London. They grew up in Rhuddlan, North Wales, and spent their childhood romping around the old castles, windswept coastline and awe-inspiring mountains of the Welsh landscape. They are the editor of Stim, an anthology of autistic authors and artists, published in 2020 to coincide with World Autism Awareness Week. Previous books include: the children’s biography Sir David Attenborough: A Life Story (2020), and the queer holiday rom-com Make You Mine This Christmas (2022). Vivi Conway and the Sword of Legend is their debut middle-grade novel. Lizzie is a vocal advocate of the importance of representative stories for all young readers and writes joyful stories that centre queerness and disability.
VICKI JOULE is an independent scholar having previously worked as a Lecturer in English Literature for 10 years. She works on eighteenth-century literature, particularly women’s writing and has published her research in scholarly journals and edited collections. Vicki lives in Penarth with her family.
Professor Paul Moorcraft grew up in Ely, Cardiff; after 40 years traveling, he returned to Wales two years ago and now lives in Penarth. He has been a film producer, war correspondent in 30 conflict zones, and taught full time (consecutively) at ten international universities, including Cardiff. For five years he was a senior instructor at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and then the high-level UK Joint Services Command and Staff College. Because of his direct experiences with facing Russian troops and working in Ukraine, he has been doing TV and radio interviews daily from his home, both for the BBC and many Arabic stations.
MIKE PARKER was raised in England and has lived in Wales for nearly half of his life. His new book All the Wide Border joins the bestseller Map Addict, The Wild Rover and On the Red Hill, which was shortlisted and Highly Commended for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing and won the non-fiction Wales Book of the Year Award. In 2021, he received the Glyndŵr Award for outstanding contribution to the arts in Wales. He is an experienced broadcaster, occasional stand-up, failed politician and has written for the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Observer and many more.
STEPHEN PAYNE is a poet and Professor Emeritus at the University of Bath. His first full-length collection, Pattern Beyond Chance, was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award in 2016. His second collection, The Windmill Proof, was published in 2021 and a pamphlet, The Wax Argument & Other Thought Experiments, was released last year. Stephen was a regular performer at the Penarth Acoustic Club and is the host of Griffin Books' lively Poetry Showcase event.
JACK SKIVENS is a Cardiff-based illustrator and the author of picture book Night of the Animal Wall.
LAURA SHEPHERD-ROBINSON'S first novel, Blood & Sugar, was one of the most lauded debuts of 2019, earning numerous prize nominations, and winning the Historical Writers’ Association Debut Crown and the Specsavers/Crimefest Best Debut Novel prize; it was also a Waterstones Thriller of the Month. Her second novel, Daughters of Night, was hailed by The Times as ‘the best historical crime novel [one] will read this year’ and was shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown, the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award, and the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year. The Square of Sevens, published June 2023, is her third novel.