Join spectacular storyteller Atinuke for a bouncy read-along with Baby and his mama. Hear all about the traditional folk tales and the stories from the bustling city in Nigeria where she grew up and which inspired her writing.

The intrepid team of researchers who brought you Custard, Culverts and Cake: Academics on Life in The Archers return with a hard-hitting exposé on the lives of the women of Ambridge. The Archers Academics are joined by actor and academic Charlotte Martin (a.k.a. Susan Carter) to examine the power of gossip in Ambridge, portrayals of love, marriage, and motherhood, female education and career expectations, women’s mental health and the hard-won right of women to play cricket.

The acclaimed science writer uses chicken as the lens for examining everything that has gone wrong in the modern agricultural system: overuse of antibiotics, threats to the environment, violations of animal welfare, destruction of farm economies and rural civic structure, disruption of international trade and delivery of over-processed, obesity-promoting, nutritionally hollow food. McKenna takes us from vast poultry farms to laboratories, kitchens and street-food markets around the world, revealing how economic, political and cultural forces converged to make our favourite meat a hidden danger. Boycott is chair of the London Food Board.

From “one of the great American writers of our time” (Los Angeles Times) – a brilliant historical crime novel, a pulse-pounding, as-it-happens narrative that unfolds in Los Angeles and Mexico in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Ellroy is author of the acclaimed LA Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz, as well as the Underworld USA trilogy.

Erika McGann, author of The Demon Notebook, The Broken Spell and The Watching Wood, conducts an interactive talk about writing books for pre-teen readers and aspiring authors.

El escritor chileno Carlos Franz ha sido el ganador de la II Bienal de Novela Mario Vargas Llosa por su novela Si te vieras con mis ojos, novela que describe un triángulo amoroso en Chile a finales del siglo XIX, con unos protagonistas muy particulares basados en personajes reales. Franz es autor de otras tres novelas, libros de ensayo y cuento, y es miembro de la Academia Chilena de la Lengua. Por su parte, el escritor y periodista Gastón García Marinozzi (Argentina) ha sacado a la luz su primera novela, Viaje al fin de la memoria, un peculiar road trip protagonizado por periodistas dedicados a la investigación. En conversación con el escritor y crítico literario Pablo Duarte.

The Cambridge astronomer introduces his ground-breaking survey that celebrates the popular subject of astronomy through 300 images created by those who have tried to understand – or who have been inspired by – the beauty and mystery of stars, planets, and beyond. The selection includes paintings, photographs, sculpture, animation, prints, sketches and digital renderings with iconic works by renowned photographers, artists and astronomers alongside previously unpublished finds.

For the first time since the Second World War, younger generations can expect less fulfilled lives than their elders. They may not be their betters, but in the second decade of the 21st century they surely are better heeled. Traditionally, society’s way of controlling the young has been to send them off to war. They would either die or learn ‘duty’. Now we send as many as 50% to university, from which they emerge encumbered with debt. Sutherland and Valentine attempt to defuse a ticking generational time-bomb.

In recent decades, hundreds of planets have been discovered, although there is no evidence of intelligent life on any of them. What does this mean about our place in the universe? Are we the only beings with the perception needed to understand the stars, see them and feel their beauty? With the scientists Christophe Galfard (France) and María Teresa Ruiz (Chile).