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The Times & Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival - 8 - 17 October 2021

Join us for a huge selection of workshops, events and family fun at this year's Cheltenham Literature Festival. And don't forget to claim your free sapling!

Cheltenham Town Hall (GL50 1QA), Imperial Square and Montpellier Gardens (GL50 1SD)

Join us at the festival to explore and enjoy trees and woods in literature.

Credit: Cheltenham Festivals

Meet the Woodland Trust for a fun-filled glimpse into our world – fighting climate change and creating havens for wildlife with woods and trees. Chat to our team, take part in family activities and claim your own free tree sapling. You can also book on to our talks exploring the future of farming and why inclusive access to nature is vital.

Cheltenham Literature Festival is the world’s first literature festival, leading the way in celebrating the written and spoken word, presenting the best new voices in fiction and poetry alongside literary greats and high-profile speakers, while inspiring over 9,000 school children with a love of books through its Literature for Schools programme. 

About Cheltenham Literature Festival

Cheltenham Literature Festival is part of Cheltenham Festivals – a charity delivering a pioneering year-round educational programme culminating in four internationally-acclaimed Jazz, Science, Music and Literature Festivals. Cheltenham Festivals creates experiences that bring joy, spark curiosity, connect communities and inspire change.

The Festival has an accompanying year-round programme of education and talent development outreach including its flagship Reading Teachers = Reading Pupils project which has rolled out nationally, enabling teachers and their pupils to rediscover the joy of reading. The other programmes include: the award-winning Beyond Words, a creative writing project working with vulnerable young people unable to access mainstream education in Gloucestershire, Words That Burn, a national human rights poetry project created in partnership with Amnesty International and Write Now, a unique mentoring, workshop and networking project that nurtures young people’s creative writing abilities.

There will be two events supported by the Woodland Trust:

Credit: Edward Parker / WTML

Pastures new: the future of farming

The pandemic has shown that we need to think carefully about how we feed the nation – and thrown light on how much we ask of the countryside. Our landscapes are caught between a rustic ideal and industrial reality, between what we say we want and what we will actually pay for. Nature is at breaking point, and so is our farming industry. Writer and photojournalist Bella Bathurst (Field Work) and fell farmer and author of The Shepherd’s Life James Rebanks (English Pastoral) explore how we got into this mess, and what we need to do about it. Chaired by John Tucker of The Woodland Trust.

Credit: Heather Swift / WTML

A countryside for all

After she became the victim of a race hate crime, journalist Anita Sethi (I Belong Here) set out to walk The Pennines, to further explore the area she regards as home and reinforce her sense of belonging in the landscape. British Bangladeshi birder and activist Mya-Rose Craig, also known as ‘Birdgirl’ (We Have a Dream) runs nature camps for inner-city Visible Minority Ethnic children through her organisation Black2Nature. They join Lucy McRobert to explore why rural Britain remains predominantly a White landscape, the ways in which we all connect with nature, and what we can do to create a truly inclusive countryside.

Further details