Morpurgo and Shute

Join us on the 26th March for a discussion between the beloved Michael Morpurgo and nature writer Joe Shute. Here they will discuss how nature and the countryside have inspired their writing from Michael’s A Farm For City Children stories to  Joe’s latest book Forecast, a fascinating blend of nature writing and journalism that investigates the history, folklore and mythology associated with the weather.

Michael Morpurgo, began writing stories in the early ’70’s, in response to the children in his class at the primary school where he taught in Kent. One of the UK’s best-loved authors and storytellers, Michael was appointed Children’s Laureate in 2003, a post he helped to set up with Ted Hughes in 1999. With his wife Clare, he set up the charity Farms for City Children, which offers children and teachers from inner-city primary schools the chance to live and work in the countryside for a week on one of the charity’s three farms in Devon, Gloucestershire and Wales. Life on the farms and his work with children has been the starting point for many of Michael’s books from The Birthday Duck to War Horse.

Joe has spent years unpicking Britain’s long-standing love affair with the weather. He has pored over the literature, art and music our weather systems have inspired and trawled through centuries of established folklore to discover the curious customs and rituals we have created in response to the seasons. But in recent years Shute has discovered a curious thing: the British seasons are changing far faster and far more profoundly than we realise. Climate change has rendered that once familiar pattern increasingly unpredictable and unrecognisable: daffodils in December, frogspawn in November and summers so hot wildfires rampage across the northern moors.

Shute has travelled all over Britain discovering how our seasons are warping, causing havoc with nature and affecting all our lives. He has trudged through the severe devastation caused by increasingly frequent flooding and visited the Northamptonshire village once dependent on hard frosts for its slate quarrying industry now forced to invest in industrial freezers due to our ever-warming winters. Even the very language we use to describe the weather, he has discovered, is changing in the modern age.

This book aims to bridge the void between our cultural expectation of the seasons and what they are actually doing. To follow the march of the seasons up and down the country and document how their changing patterns affect the natural world and all of our lives. And to discover what happens to centuries of folklore, identity and memory when the very thing they subsist on is changing for good.