Winter Words Festival 2024 Announcement

Winter Words Festival 2024

8 – 11 Feb

James Cosmo, Sally Magnusson, Jackie Kay, and David Greig to feature in Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s Winter Words Festival 2024

We are thrilled to announce the lineup for our 20th Winter Words Festival, featuring an exciting line up of authors, playwrights, adventurers, broadcasters, and actors from around Scotland and further afield for a celebration of all things artistic and literary.

From 8-11 February, we will host, an exciting programme of events including stimulating and entertaining conversations, as well as performances and special events in its Studio performance space. These will include broadcaster Sally Magnusson in conversation with the journalist Magnus Linklater about her third novel Music in the Dark; celebrated diarist Chris Mullin will talk about his book Didn’t You Use To Be Chris Mullin? Diaries 2010-2022 which gives his take on the twelve turbulent years since he left Parliament as a Labour MP; author and theatre critic Allan Radcliffe will discuss his new book, The Old Haunts, a wistful coming-of-age story, which paints a tender portrait of grief in all its complexities; and author, poet and third National Poet for Scotland Jackie Kay will be in conversation with our Artistic Director Elizabeth Newman about her illustrious career.

The theme of the Scottish outdoors and nature will feature strongly in this year’s festival as Catherine Moorehead will give a talk about her book Mountain Guru – The Life of Doug Scott which explores the life of one of the greatest mountaineers in history, whose extraordinary expeditions were undertaken over a period of four decades across seven continents; acclaimed author and presenter of BBC One Scotland’s From the Sky, James Crawford will return to the festival to talk about his book, Wild History: Journeys into Lost Scotland; Annie Worsley will discuss her acclaimed book Windswept which tells the story of what happened when she decided to trade in a busy life in academia to take on a croft on the west coast of Scotland. BBC journalist Neil Ansell will be talking about his book The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence, which is set amongst the wildlife in the Scottish Highlands. Dr Kerri Andrews will be discussing her book Way Makers, the follow-up to the best-selling Wanderers, and the first anthology of women’s writing about walking, and Dougie Strang talks about his journey through the Scottish Highlands to follow a series of folktales and myths to the places in which they are set in his book The Bone Cave. Naturalist, writer, and photographer, Polly Pullar talks about the inspirations behind her writing, highlighting the importance of nurturing love and respect for nature in all its complexities.

Making a welcome return to Pitlochry Festival Theatre will be acclaimed Scottish playwright David Greig who will be talking about his debut novel Columba’s Bones which explores a fascinating clash of cultures and religions that played an important part in the shaping of Scotland. Award-winning playwright May Sumbwanyambe and Dr Peggy Brunache, lecturer on the history of Atlantic slavery at the University of Glasgow and Director of the Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies, will discuss the case of freedom fighter and Black abolitionist Joseph Knight and Scottish abolitionism, the subject of Sumbwanyambe’s award winning play Enough of Him which premiered at Pitlochry Festival Theatre in 2022.

As well as this impressive lineup of writers, this year’s Winter Words Festival will include two special events. On Saturday 10 February the theatre will be hosting An Audience with James Cosmo. Having appeared in over 130 films and TV shows, including Highlander, Braveheart, Trainspotting, Troy, Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials, actor James Cosmo will be in conversation about his long and illustrious career in film and television, followed by a tasting of his STORYMAN whisky. Finally, the performance poet Kokumo Rocks will be reading and performing a selection of her vibrant and intense poems. Kokumo’s poetry explores the themes of love, race, freedom, and imprisonment, which she does with a sense of fun and humour.

The Winter Words Festival runs from 8-11 February 2024. Priority bookings for Members from 27 November. Tickets go on general sale on Friday 1 December. For tickets and further information call the Box Office team on 01796 484626 

WINTER WORDS FESTIVAL 2024

WINTER WORDS FESTIVAL 2024

Brochure

Make the most of the festival weekend 8 – 11 Feb 2024

Kokumo

Kokumo

Kokumo is an African, Asian, Scottish black woman, author and international performance poet. She has been invited to the USA, Canada, lndia, Greece and Spain and all over the UK to present and her work is also used in schools. She teaches creative writing in universities for PhD students from the USA in Edinburgh University and also in secondary and primary schools across Scotland including in Mull, Kirkwall, Stromness and Angus where children and adults don’t easily have access to poets and writers from the UK. The themes in her work are diverse and reflect the humour, seriousness, and the absurd in everyday life which she presents with humour and a passion for living. She is dyslexic, which she says helps her creativity enormously. The fact that she’s a writer gives confidence to dyslexic pupils when she tells them that she can’t spell and finds reading difficult and helps them have hope for their own futures.
Neil Ansell

Neil Ansell

Former newspaper and BBC journalist Neil Ansell is now a full- time writer living in the Western Highlands. He is author of a series of acclaimed books of nature memoir, all of which reflect on different aspects of our relationship with the natural world.

His book Deep Country, Five Years in the Welsh Hills was published by Hamish Hamilton to rave reviews. It is a book about staying still, about living a life that is the direct opposite of that experienced by most people in our urbanised, over peopled, technically advanced, globalized, ultra connected world. Deer Island followed, and then The Last Wilderness, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Wainwright Golden Beer and Highland Book Prizes. His most recent book is The Circling Sky, is part childhood memoir, blended with exquisite nature observation, and the story of one man’s journey over a year to one of the UK’s key natural habitats, the New Forest of Hampshire.
Annie Worsley

Annie Worsley

Annie Worsley is a writer, geographer, grandmother and crofter who lives in North West Scotland.

A physical geographer with particular interests in spatial and temporal relationships between people, landscape and the natural world, Annie’s doctoral research in the New Guinea Highlands in 1979 examined the environmental history of montane rainforests and human impacts upon landscapes. Her experiences there were completely life-changing and lead to a passionate love for nature and wild places.

After a career break raising her four children, Annie returned to full-time academic life in 1999. She investigated long-term environmental change in the peat bogs, hills and coasts of North West England, and the spatial and temporal history of pollution and its effects on human health in urban environments. Annie was awarded a Personal Chair in Environmental Change by Edge Hill University. She left full-time academia in 2011.

Annie now writes for Elementum Journal and her essays have been published by Elliot & Thompson in the Seasons anthologies edited by Melissa Harrison, and in Women on Nature, edited by Katharine Norbury. Her first book, Windswept, was published by William Collins in 2023.
David Greig

David Greig

David Greig is a Scottish playwright who studied Drama and English at Bristol University. Since setting up the Suspect Culture theatre company in the 1990s, his plays have been performed widely in Scotland and around the world, including Midsummer, The Events, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Local Hero, and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart. He is currently the Artistic Director at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre. Columba’s Bones is his first book.
May Sumbwanyambe

May Sumbwanyambe

Described by The Scotsman as ‘one of the key creative figures in Scotland’s increasingly determined effort to come to terms with its own colonial past, and particularly with Scottish involvement in slavery and the slave trade,’ May Sumbwanyambe is an academic and award-winning playwright from Edinburgh, who has written extensively about the lives of Joseph Knight, Annie Thomson, and John and Margaret Wedderburn in the run-up to the legal case that ruled that slavery was not recognised and could not be enforced in Scotland.

Credits: Enough of Him (Pitlochry Festival Theatre/National Theatre of Scotland). Other work includes: Ghost Light (Edinburgh International Festival and National Theatre of Scotland); Joseph Knight (BBC Scotland/National Theatre of Scotland); After Independence (Arcola Theatre, Papatango Theatre) The Parrot House (Guildhall School of Music and Drama); After Independence, The Trial of Joseph Knight and Back Home (BBC Radio 4). He is currently writing a new stage play on commission to the Citizens Theatre.
Peggy Brunache

Peggy Brunache

Dr Peggy Brunache is a lecturer in Public History and Archaeology at the University of Glasgow and serves as the founding Director of the Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies. As a historical archaeologist, she has excavated sites in West Africa, Caribbean, and the United States. Many of her public-facing projects include designing MOOCS, and working with theatres, science and culture festivals.

Recent publications include ‘Slave-Produced Commodities’ in the edited book, Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance with an accompanying exhibition at Fitzwilliam Museum. Her international media appearances include the Discovery Science Channel, BBC TV, ITV, and documentaries in the US and Germany.
Allan Radcliffe

Allan Radcliffe

Allan Radcliffe was born in Perth and now lives in South Queensferry. He is a freelance writer and critic and was previously well known among the contributors to the Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Sunday Times, Metro and the Big Issue, among other papers and journals.

His poetry and short stories have appeared in Out There, Elsewhere, Markings, the Best Gay Short Stories, New Writing Scotland, Celtic View and Gutter Magazine and he has written a monologue about the painter Frances MacDonald McNair that has been performed at art galleries up and down the country.

The Old Haunts is his debut novel. His writing has won the Allen Wright Award and the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Allan is delighted to be appearing at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, which he has been attending regularly since a school trip to see Purves Puppets in the mid-1980s.
Catherine Moorehead

Catherine Moorehead

Catherine Moorehead was brought up in Nairn.

After her English Literature MA from Edinburgh University and PGCEs in English and French from Moray House, she enjoyed a long teaching career in France, Scotland and England which included directing school plays, running a hillwalking society, teaching wine appreciation and leading six expeditions to obscure parts of Central Asia.

She became a ‘Compleat’ Munroist in 1996. In retirement in the Cairngorms National Park, Catherine writes and edits and enjoys her interest in wine and good company. Catherine is a member of the Alpine Club and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay was born and brought up in Scotland. She is the author of—among other books—The Adoption Papers, which won the Forward Prize, Red Dust Road, winner of the Scottish Book of the Year Award, Trumpet, and the Costa-shortlisted Fiere.

She was the third Makar, or National Poet for Scotland (2016-2021). She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Salford.
Sally Magnusson

Sally Magnusson

As a broadcaster Sally Magnusson has worked on a range of BBC programmes, including Reporting Scotland, and is the author of eleven books, including most recently three novels of which Music in the Dark is the latest.

Her bestselling memoir Where Memories Go: Why Dementia Changes Everything, has been credited with improving knowledge and understanding of this widespread brain condition. Out of that experience she founded the music and dementia charity Playlist for Life, for which she received a MBE in 2023.
Chris Mullin

Chris Mullin

Chris Mullin, author, journalist and former MP, a minister in three departments and chairman of the Home Affairs select committee.

His books include three highly acclaimed volumes of diaries, A View from the Foothills, Decline and Fall and A Walk-On Part. He has recently published a fourth volume, Didn’t You Use to be Chris Mullin? (Diaries 2010-22). He is the author of four novels, the best known of which, A Very British Coup, was made into an award-winning television series. In 2018 he published a sequel, The Friends of Harry Pertkins. In 2016 he published, Hinterland — a Memoir.

He is an accomplished public speaker, a judge of The Man Booker Prize, 2011, Chairman of the Heritage Lottery Fund for the North East of England, 2012-17, Member, Northumberland National Park Authority, 2017-present. Trustee, Chillingham Wild Cattle.
James Cosmo

James Cosmo

James Cosmo is a Scottish acting legend who has appeared in over 130 films and TV shows, including Highlander, Braveheart, Trainspotting, Troy, Game of Thrones and His Dark Materials.

He studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Bristol Old Vic drama school. He was awarded the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in 2018 for his services to drama. He is also a patron of the charity Chance for Childhood.
Kerri Andrews

Kerri Andrews

Kerri Andrews is the author of the best-selling Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, and the editor both of the first-ever anthology of women’s writing about walking, Way Makers, and the first-ever edition of Nan Shepherd’s Correspondence. She has written about the history of walking for the Guardian, Trail Magazine and others. She is Reader in Women’s Literature and Textual Editing at Edge Hill University, Lancashire.
Dougie Strang

Dougie Strang

Dougie Strang is a writer, storyteller and performer whose work takes inspiration from the Scottish landscape.

Born and brought up in Glasgow, he studied folklore at Edinburgh University and has lived in various parts of Scotland, including Perthshire, Galloway, Annandale and on the Isle of Iona. He and his wife have recently moved to Argyll, where they help run a small hill farm.

Dougie has created and directed numerous performances for festivals and events, and is a member of the Dark Mountain Project, an international network of writers, artists and thinkers whose work addresses current social and environmental crisis
James Crawford

James Crawford

James Crawford is an acclaimed historian, publisher and broadcaster.

He is the author of nine books including Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of the World’s Greatest Lost Buildings and The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World – both of which were shortlisted for best non-fiction book at the Saltire Literary Awards.

His latest book is Wild History: Journeys Into Lost Scotland. He has also written and presented three series of the landmark BBC One documentary Scotland from the Sky.
Polly Pullar

Polly Pullar

Polly Pullar is a conservationist, naturalist, writer and photographer. She specialises in wildlife and countryside matters and is a wildlife rehabilitator.

She contributes to numerous magazines and is the author of 10 books, including Fauna Scotica – Animals & People in Scotland; A Richness of Martens – Wildlife Tales from the Highlands; The Red Squirrel – A Future in the Forest; A Scurry of Squirrels – Nurturing the Wild; A Drop in the Ocean – Lawrence MacEwen & the Island of Muck; and a memoir – The Horizontal Oak – A Life in Nature.

She is co-founder of A Write Highland Hoolie – the Mallaig Book Festival, a Trustee of Aigas Field Centre, and an Ambassador for the Beaver Trust.