Rosanna Davison talks about how she came to study nutrition. She gives us the skinny on her own diet and lifestyle, and shares her top tips from her new book Eat Yourself Beautiful on cutting out sugar and including more fruit and vegetables in your diet.

Photo by Miki Barlok

There are 6.5 million unpaid carers in the UK. There’ll be more soon as the demography changes. The Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Health and Social Care Law examines the reality of today and the implications for the future with film-maker Anne Cottringer.

Watch the YouTube video here

Rob Penn cut down an ash tree to see how many things could be made from it. Journeying from Wales and Ireland across Europe to the US, he finds that the ancient skills and knowledge of the properties of ash, developed over millennia making wheels and arrows, furniture and baseball bats, are far from dead. He chronicles how the urge to appreciate trees still runs through us like grain through wood.

The Colombian poet, novelist and playwright Piedad Bonnet speaks with the poet Luis García Montero about her latest book Lo que no tiene nombre (Alfaguara), in which she deals with pain, death and resignation when writing about her son Daniel’s suicide.

Co-organized with the Embassy of Colombia in Spain

Join us to celebrate this prestigious literary prize for writers aged 39 and under, as Fiona McFarlane, 2017 International Dylan Thomas Prize winner talks to Dai Smith, Chair of the judges. The shortlist for this year’s prize is: Anuk Arudpragasm The Story of a Brief Marriage; Alys Conran Pigeon; Luke Kennard Cain; Fiona McFarlane The High Places; Sarah Perry The Essex Serpent; Callan Wink Dog Run Moon: Stories.

The great novelist, author of Dirt Music and Cloudstreet, is publishing two non-fiction books. Charged with love for the huge, besieging force of Australia’s wild spaces, Island Home: A Landscape Memoir is a passionate call for their conservation. His deeply personal The Boy Behind the Curtain: Notes from an Australian Life shows how moments from his childhood and life growing up have shaped his views on class, faith, fundamentalism, the environment, and literature.

In 2016 over 50 organisations came together across the UK to produce and publish the second State of Nature report. It shows that the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. The long-term future of farming is at stake if the natural systems on which it is based are depleted. Our panel looks at what the next 30 years could look like if the natural environment was placed at the centre of farming policies post-Brexit. Poet Martin Daws will open and close this event.

We often joke that teenagers don’t have brains. For some reason, it’s socially acceptable to mock people in this stage of their lives. The need for intense friendships, the excessive risk taking and the development of many mental illnesses – depression, addiction, schizophrenia – begin during these formative years. Drawing upon cutting-edge research in her London laboratory, the neuroscientist explains what happens inside the adolescent brain, what her team’s experiments have revealed about our behaviour, and how we relate to each other and our environment as we go through this period of our lives. She shows that while adolescence is a period of vulnerability, it is also a time of enormous creativity – one that should be acknowledged, nurtured and celebrated. Chaired by Claire Armitstead.

When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming a grown-up, journalist and former Sunday Times dating columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir she vividly recounts falling in love, wrestling with self-sabotage, finding a job, throwing a socially disastrous Rod Stewart themed house party, getting drunk, getting dumped, realising that Ivan from the corner shop is the only man you’ve ever been able to rely on, and finding that that your mates are always there at the end of every messy night out. Alderton’s captivating memoir is about bad dates, good friends and – above all else – about recognising that you and you alone are enough.

Atinuke, author of the Anna Hibiscus and No 1 Car Spotter books is also a Nigerian storyteller. Don’t miss the chance to share her stories.

7+ years