Welcome to this year’s Festival programme. We hope you enjoy the great lineup of poets, writers, artists, musicians and actors. Tickets for most events are £5 or as shown below, and will be available to buy either on the door or via Eventbrite from September.

Friday 16th October

3.30pm Poetry Tea at the Tower House Gallery

6 pm Knighton Writing Competition Prizegiving in Library

All welcome to meet the winners of the Knighton Writing Competition and hear the winning entries.

6.45 pm Opening Event for the Festival Art Exhibition

7.30pm Main Hall – Film: H is for Hawk

Based on Helen Macdonald’s acclaimed memoir, this powerful adaptation follows a woman who, after the loss of her father, turns to the ancient art of falconry in an attempt to cope with grief and reconnect with the world around her. As she trains a wild goshawk named Mabel, an intense and transformative relationship begins to unfold.

Tickets £6 on the door

Saturday 24th October

9.30am John Rux-Burton – Landscape as Monument: The Prehistoric Sacred Landscape of the Walton Basin

Why did thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—gather repeatedly in the Walton Basin over 3,000 years ago? New scientific evidence, computer modelling and geological discoveries are changing our understanding of what, long before Stonehenge, may have been Britain’s most important ceremonial landscape.

John Rux-Burton connects monuments, ridges, celestial movement, human and landscape forms, sacred quartz and ‘magical’ springs. His forthcoming book traces how monuments answered, framed and made landscape perform human meaning. In 3700 BC, over the hill from Knighton, the Basin was perhaps Britain’s earliest sustained experiment in applied geometry—a research powerhouse.

10.45am Julie Brominicks – Cader Idris: Let the Mountain Speak

What would a mountain say if it could tell its own story? In Cader Iris: Let the Mountain Speak, Julie Brominicks explores this question. Interweaving her own experiences with what she learns through her research, she creates afascinating biography of the mountain.

Humanity appears fleeting but significant, captured through interviews with farmers, hikers, rescuers and other regular visitors. Their stories become part of the landscape, contrasting with the deep history and evolution of the mountain itself. The result is an expressive portrait of a place which holds deep significance to communities across Wales, and which awes and inspires those who know it.

12 noon Professor Fiona Sampson – Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand

Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, by the time she was thirty she was internationally renowned as George Sand, her novels out-selling Victor Hugo in the English language. Soon, the legend of Sand herself – cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuous – scandalised Paris, seeming to break every rule set for women in polite society. What can we learn from the way she lived? Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy, or did her sexual and emotional relationships with the leading figures of her day – from Frederic Chopin to Gustave Flaubert – form part of her dialogue with the world, a dialogue intrinsic to writing itself?

In Becoming George, award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. For too long underestimated, though never by her peers, she speaks to us as a figure in some ways centuries ahead of her time

1pm Lunch in the cafe with music from Borderline Blues

2pm Charlie Walker – On Thin Ice: An Explorer’s Memoir of Siberia, Surveillance and Survival

In early 2022, Charlie Walker set out to hike 600 miles along the frozen rivers of Siberia. He hoped to cut through the myth of the gulag and the permafrost to understand who its people are and how they reckon with their haunted past, as well as what the future might hold for this remote corner of our world. But on 24 February, Russia invaded Ukraine, with devastating consequences.What had begun as an adventure swiftly descended into a paranoid nightmare, as Walker began to suspect he was being monitored by the Russian authorities. Shortly afterwards he was arrested and imprisoned.

On Thin Ice juxtaposes the harsh beauty of a Siberian winter with a thriller-like series of events that exposes the dark heart of Putin’s propaganda machine.It is both the extraordinary record of one man’s walk through the most inhospitable place on earth and a powerful insight into a deeply troubled – and troubling – nation.

‘This almost insanely intrepid and dangerous trek in remotest Siberia is astonishing in itself. But it also brings invaluable experience of Russian reactions to the war against Ukraine. Altogether extraordinary’ – Colin Thubron, author of The Amur River

3.15pm Megan C Hayes – Glimmering: Healing in 21 Wild Swim

In Glimmering Megan Hayes seeks solace and finds resilience in the wild waters of Wales and beyond. This series of swims-across-the-page tell a lyrical, haunting, yet hopeful story about healing and the restorative, redemptive power of our experiences in nature.

Some of the world’s most beautiful swimming spots, from the sea at Llangrannog to Australia’s West Coast, provide the backdrop to a story of post-traumatic growth through glimmers – the term psychologists give to our moments of connection, joy, and safety.

Sunday 25th October

Friday 23rd October

7pm The Willow Globe Theatre Company presents The Tempest

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

The Willow Globe Theatre Company returns to the Festival once more, bringing one of Shakespeare’s most thrilling and magical plays to life with The Tempest, a story of shipwreck, sorcery and forgiveness.

Tickets: £14 adults, £7 U16s, £35 family

Saturday 24th October

9.30am Maya Jordan – CHOPSY The Resistance Tales of a Working-class Woman

A sharply funny, furious and rousing account of a life lived in triumphant opposition to the limitations and systemic inequalities of a working-class woman’s life.

Underestimated and overlooked at each stage and age, Maya Jordan’s ambition and resilience was born in the library and nourished by reading and the Open University – through early motherhood, precarious housing, caring responsibilities and chronic disability – to a point where she finally seizes her right to write.

10.45am Mike Parker – A Sense of Place

From writing guide books and TV travelogues to his popular works of non-fiction, an acute sense of place has always been at the heart of Mike’s work. For the past ten years, he’s been working on a loose trilogy. On the Red Hill (2019). a search for the queer rural, won the non-fiction Wales Book of the Year, and was runner up for the Wainwright Prize. All the Wide Border (2023), an intimate celebration of the worlds between England and Wales, was named by Waterstones as one of the top ten travel books of the year. The concluding volume, Mid Land: a journey into England’s heart, will be out next year.

12 noon Louis D. Hall – In Green: Two Horses, Two Strangers, a Journey to the End of Land

Inspired by Don Quixote, Louis decided to fulfil a childhood dream – to make an uncharted journey on an unknown horse on forgotten mountain paths through the hills and mountains of Italy, France, and Spain. The result is this glorious piece of rich, romantic travel writing. Through snow,solitude and wild encounters, Louis documents a slower way of moving through the world – a meditation on companionship, endurance and landscape.

‘A classic adventure narrative’ CAL FLYN, author of Islands of Abandonment

1pm Lunch in the cafe with music by The Speedgums

The Speedgums are a lively four-piece serving up a riotous mix of country, folk, rockabilly and good old-fashioned roots music. With violin, double bass, squeezebox and banjo, they create a wonderfully distinctive acoustic sound that’s full of character, energy and a healthy dose of hillbilly swagger. Expect familiar favourites given the Speedgums treatment, blending foot-stomping rhythms, infectious melodies and a generous helping of humour. 

2pm Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch – MILK WOOD MEMOIR

A startling and luminous collection from one of Wales’s most gifted living poets.

Milk Wood Memoir, the fourth collection by Samantha Wynne- Rhydderch, opens with a handful of family recollections of Dylan Thomas, including Samantha’s grandfather’s presence in the poet’s house on the night he was shot at in March 1945. Thomas’s wartime sojourn in New Quay in West Wales from 1944-45 was one of the most important creative periods in his life. Many scholars have linked the small coastal town to the imagined Llareggub (buggerall) in which Thomas set his most famous work, Under Milk Wood.

New Quay’s present-day poet-resident, Samantha Wynne- Rhydderch, takes up the baton of the guide who never made it into the final version of Thomas’s play, showing us around her hometown through the eyes of its inhabitants past and present. In a series of eco-elegies, she explores how the wood of Under Milk Wood is turning into a floating forest due to coastal erosion. The paths once walked by Dylan Thomas between his bungalow and the pubs of New Quay are slowly collapsing into the sea, taking with them both trees and houses.

3.15pm Bethany Handley – My Body is a Meadow

Since childhood, Bethany Handley has always felt most at home out in the wilds of the Welsh countryside. This all changed when Bethany became a full-time wheelchair user in her twenties and suddenly found herself padlocked out of the landscapes she belonged to. Today, nearly one in four people are Disabled in the UK. Public rights of way are blocked in 32,000 places across England and Wales.

My Body is a Meadow writes into this troubling landscape. Passionate and political, it delivers a galvanising call for us to rethink how we live among nature and each other. Lyrical and personal, Bethany Handley invites readers to wheel alongside her as she explores ableism, climate justice and what nature means to her.

11am Talk in the Offa’s Dyke Centre by Professor Keith Ray – Offa’s Dyke: A Window on Early Medieval Britain

The new permanent exhibition at the Offa’s Dyke Centre in Knighton was prepared and put in place early in 2021 with the help of a Covid Recovery Scheme grant awarded to the Offa’s Dyke Association by what was then the Welsh Assembly Government. The design consultant and writer of the exhibition was Professor Keith Ray (Cardiff University School of History, Archaeology and Religion).

This talk explains the background to the exhibition and the thematic choices and selections made and indicates something of its impact within the Centre and more widely. The talk then describes the process of preparing a book about the core theme of the exhibition: why and how Britain’s greatest earthwork monument, Offa’s Dyke, provides a ‘window’ onto the obscure and relatively undocumented borderlands of emergent ‘England’ and ‘Wales’ in the three centuries before the Norman Conquest.

Free entry

3pm Concert by Lumas Winds in St Edward’s Hall

Lumas Winds are a multi-award winning quintet at the forefront of the new generation of wind ensembles, and have been described as an ‘effervescent wind quintet, lively in their performance style and enterprising in their choice of repertoire’ (Seen and Heard International). Committed ambassadors for wind chamber music and the rich variety of repertoire it offers, they regularly feature at festivals and music clubs up and down the UK.

Tickets £15 on the door.