Meet the 2026 Speakers
Marc Allum
Antiques Roadshow – BTS
MARC ALLUM is a freelance art and antiques journalist, writer and broadcaster based in Wiltshire. He has been a miscellaneous specialist on the BBC Antiques Roadshow since 1998 which gives him a unique insight into today’s talk “Antiques Roadshow – behind the scenes” and he has appeared on numerous other television and radio programmes. Marc regularly writes for mainstream magazines and is an author, antiques consultant and lecturer.
Marc has his own unique style with interests ranging from pre-history to modern design and is a self-confessed collectaholic. He has a passion and reputation for divining the unusual; a “desire to connect with history through the interpretation and pursuit of objects and their origins”.
The one that got away.
Terri Apter
Grandparenting
TERRI APTER PhD, is a psychologist, writer, and former Senior Tutor at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her books on family dynamics, identity and relationships received international acclaim. Her reviews and articles have appeared in The Guardian, the TLS, the FT, the New York Times Book Review, and The Psychologist.
Raised in Chicago, she moved to the UK to study at Edinburgh University and Cambridge University where she has worked ever since
A trip to grandma and grandpa’s house can solve anything.
Johnny Ball
Stories That Must Be Told
JOHNNY BALL began his entertainment career as a Butlin’s Redcoat, and was an entertainer in northern clubs and cabaret. His long career in TV and radio started as one of the hosts of Play School beginning in 1967. Subsequently he presented several series of science and technology programmes desigened for children in which the subjects were presented in an entertaining and accessible way for their young audience.
There are not the same factual (children’s television) shows any more.
Alexander Ballinger
A Career in Costume
ALEXANDER BALLINGER is a film historian and author of “New Cinematographers” and “The Rough Guide to Film Noir”.
Great costumes can underpin excellence in performance.
Damien Boyd
Blue Blood
DAMIEN BOYD. Welcome back to Damien Boyd. Damien is a former West Country solicitor who draws on extensive experience of criminal law and his time in the Crown Prosecution Service. “Blue Blood” is the fifteenth novel in the D.I. Nick Dixon crime series. It starts with a body found floating in the water on Nick Dixon’s wedding day……………………
Crime novels – “the corpse’s story seeking justice.”
Andy Brown
Poetry, Music and Open Mic
Andy Brown
Andy is a poet, poetry commentator and novelist who has published more than fifteen collections of poetry, and is a well-known performer and singer songwriter in the South West. He is Professor of Creative and Critical Writing at Exeter University.
The first things I wrote that I was happy for others to see/hear were songs.
Peter Carpenter
Bowieland
PETER CARPENTER is a poet and writer. After open heart surgery he was given a simple but profound directive – to walk if he wishes to stay on this planet. When his muse and guiding light, David Bowie passed away in 2016, Peter understood what he needed to do. With no shrine or memorial to honour the man who had been a source of companionship and inspiration, he embarked on a journey into the past, tracing the streets, towns, and locations where David Jones transformed into something extraordinary.
I’m an instant star. Just add water and mix.
Imogen Corrigan
The Bayeux Tapestry
IMOGEN CORRIGAN spent nearly twenty years in the British Army before embarking on a complete change of career involving her life-long interest in medieval history. She returned to education, graduating in 2004 with a First Class Honours degree in medieval history from the University of Kent, and then followed with an M.Phil from Birmingham University.
History’s most devastating document of war.
Sarah Dunant
The Marchesa
SARAH DUNANT studied History at Newnham College, Cambridge, from where she went on to become a writer, a broadcaster, teacher and critic. She is the author of six novels set in Renaissance Italy which weave cutting-edge historical scholarship into fiction, exploring women’s lives through art, sex and religion. Her most recent novel, published in 2025, is “The Marchesa”, a study of the great Renaissance woman patron, Isabella d’Este. “The Marchesa” is Renaissance history at its most vivid, an immersive, multi-layered experience that mixes historical fiction with biography, scholarship and art, images of both the people and the time. These books are international best-sellers and have been translated into thirty languages.
The first lady of the world.
Midge Gillies
Atlantic Furies
MIDGE GILLIES is a journalist, biographer and creative writing tutor. Educated at Girton College, Cambridge, her journalistic career has included extensive contributions to The Guardian and Los Angeles Times. She specialises in social history and biographies set in the late Victorian era and first half of the twentieth century.
Flying is the best possible thing for women.
Tristan Gooley
The Hidden Seasons
TRISTAN GOOLEY is an author and natural navigator: he set up his natural navigation school in 2008 and is the author of award-winning and internationally bestselling books including The Natural Navigator (2010), “The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs”, “How to Read Water “ (2016), “How to Read a Tree” (2023) and “The Hidden Seasons” (2025). In The Hidden Seasons he shows us how to read the clues that the sun, moon, stars, plants, fungi animals and water give us but we miss beacuse we don’t know how or where to look. His books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into 20 languages.
The Sherlock Holmes of Nature.
Sir Jeremy Hunt
Can We Be Great Again? / Can We Be Rich Again?
Sir JEREMY HUNT was first elected to the House of Commons in 2005 as MP for Godalming and Ash. He has held many of the great offices of state in successive Conservative governments, and was the longest serving health secretary in British history. His two latest books Can We Be Great Again? and the newly launched 2026 publication Can we Be Rich Again? pose many questions and challenges for us all.
If you put us in a difficult corner, we will stand our ground- that is the kind of country we are.
Amy Jeffs
Old Songs
AMY JEFFS is a Sunday Times best-selling historian. A Somerset-based author and artist, she has a PhD in Art History from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and specialises in medieval art and culture. In “Old Songs” she has fused short stories, histories, lyrics, and gorgeous illustrations by Gwen Burns, to create a rich compendium, singing of travel, mystery, magic and the essential urges of humanity.
Music is storytelling, melody and rhythm.
Alan Johnson
Harold Wilson
The Rt Hon ALAN JOHNSON has held some of the highest offices of state while serving in the Blair and Brown governments. He became MP for Hull West and Hessle in 1997 and stood down as an MP in 2017.
The Labour Party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing.
Edward Wilson – Lee and Jeff Wilson
Diverging Roads
Edward Wilson- Lee….teaches medieval and Renaissance literature at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He has written many books and articles for the academic world and the general public. The Grammar of Angels was chosen as a Telegraph Book of the Year for 2025. In Shakespeare in Swahililand, Edward brought his experience of Africa into conjunction with his life long study of Shakespeare’s plays. His brother Jeff Wilson is a multiple Emmy and BAFTA award winning director and producer of wildlife films. He is now based in Bristol.
All I wanted to do was get back to Africa.
Andrew Lownie
Entitled – The Fall of The House of York
ANDREW LOWNIE is a British historian and author and head of the eponymous literary agency. He was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
He is a renowned royal biographer, having written about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (“Traitor King”) and the Mountbattens (“Their Lives and Loves”). “Entitled….” was a Book of the Year for The Times, the FT and Waterstones.
The happiest divorced couple in the world.
Nicola Moorby
Turner and Constable
NICOLA MOORBY is an art historian and curator specialising in British art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular interest in landscape, watercolour and historic techniques and materials
The first is all truth, the last all poetry: the one is silver, the other gold
Tim Pears
The Horseman
TIM PEARS grew up in Devon and left school at 16. He worked in a wide variety of unskilled jobs: trainee welder, assistant librarian, trainee reporter, archaeological worker, fruit picker, nursing assistant – the list goes on. But he was always writing and, in time, making short films. His novels are chronicles of our time, exploring moral challenges as they are expressed in the dynamics and politics of relationships and family life and draw from the rural Somerset and Devon with which he is associated, and with which he is very familiar.
A sense of bereavement for a world gone by.
Monisha Rajesh
Moonlight Express
Monisha Rajesh
MONISHA RAJESH is an author and journalist whose writing has appeared in Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph. Born in Norfolk she mostly grew up in Yorkshire – with a brief stint in Madras. Somewhere along the way she developed a love for, and curiosity about, train journeys. Travel features in much of her journalism, especially train travel as depicted in Around India in 80 Trains, in AroundThe World in 80 Trains and in her most recent book Moonlight Express, Around The World by Night Train. All her books have garnered great critical acclaim. IrvineWelsh has said “No-one writes trains like Monisha Rajesh” and William Dalrymple described Moonlight Express as “a moonlight express to travel writing heaven. ….. Monisha Rajesh’s wittiest and most irresistible adventure yet”.
This is the night train crossing the border, bringing the cheque and the postal order.
Liam Shaw
A Dangerous Miracle
LIAM SHAW is a biologist based at the University of Bristol, focussed on researching bacterial evolution, particularly the genetics of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Liam has also written a detailed statistical analysis of coughs on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”!
Not all bugs need drugs.
Kathy Slack
Rough Patch
Kathy Slack is an award-winning food writer, cook and vegetable grower. She’s a rat race escapee who began her life in food at Daylesford Organic Farm before becoming a full-time writer and presenter sharing recipes and stories inspired by her back garden veg patch. She has written regular features for Delicious magazine, OcadoLife, Borough Market’s Market Life, and is a regular contributor to the BBC Gardeners World website. Her debut cookbook, From the Veg Patch, was shortlisted for The Guild of Food Writers Award for Best Cookbook.
Kathy gives regular talks and demonstrations about seasonal food, in her role as Fortnum & Mason’s vegetable expert, all with a focus on growing and cooking your own food. Her latest book, Rough Patch not only offers new recipes based on garden produce but explores how growing food helped her leave a high flying career and build a new life inspired by the land.
“There should be a warning: cooking out of the garden will ruin you forever for anything else.”
Petroc Trelawny
Trelawny’s Cornwall
PETROC TRELAWNEY is probably best known as a television broadcaster, and Radio 3 presenter of “Breakfast” and “In Tune”. He shares his first name with one of Cornwall’s best known saints and his second is the name of its unofficial national anthem.
Cornwall is one of the most beatiful places, with great people
Rachel Trethewey
Muv
RACHEL TRETHEWAY has a History degree from Oxford University and a PhD in English from Exeter University. She won the Philip Geddes Prize for student journalism and in her subsequent journalistic career she reviewed historical books and biographies.
Life doesn’t come with a manual. It comes with a mother.
Minette Walters
The Players
MINETTE WALTERS studied French at Durham University, graduating in 1971. The following year she joined IPC magazines as a sub-editor in 1972 and became an editor of Woman’s Weekly Library the following year. She supplemented her salary by writing romantic novelettes, short stories, and serials in her spare time. She turned freelance in 1977. Her books are published in almost 40 countries and she has sold in excess of 25 million copies.
“My lord”, they said , “this poor creature is on the parish.” “Do not trouble yourselves,”said the judge, I will ease the parish of the burden.”
Gabriel Weston
Alive
GABRIEL WESTON studied English at Edinburgh University before enrolling in a pioneering medical degree programme designed to encourage arts students to become doctors. Born in 1970, Gabriel graduated as a doctor in 2000 and became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 2003. She now works as a part-time ENT surgeon and has also worked as a prime-time TV doctor for over five years. She was the sole presenter of the six-part series Incredible Medicine: Doctor Weston’s Casebook (BBC2), and has featured in seven series of Trust Me I’m a Doctor (BBC2). She is the author of Direct Red: A Surgeon’s Story which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in September 2009 and won the PEN/J Ackerley Award for Autobiography in May 2010.
Anatomy is destiny.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey
The Spy and the Devil
TIM WILLASEY-WILSEY is an author, historian, academic and former diplomat. He served for 27 years as a British diplomat in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe, and since leaving the FCO in 2008, he has concentrated on lecturing and writing on government approaches to conflict and its resolution, and on terrorism and insurgency.
The life of spies is to know not be known