Contemporary Art, Furniture & Craft Gallery · Licensed Café
Thursday 24 September 2026, 7pm
Tickets: £12 (under 21s £6)
Proceeds to Book Aid International. Extra donations can be given on the night.
Doors 6pm, bar and hot supper available
Tickets available from Bridport Tourist Information Centre
tel: 01308 424901
or paste this address into your browser https://bridportandwestbay.co.uk/tickets/talks/
From Gilgamesh to Gawain and the Green Knight, the Brothers Grimm to Grimdark, the natural world has provided the backdrop for Fantasy since its earliest iterations. The playgrounds of childhood are often a writer’s first Fantasy landscape and can develop into fully fledged storyworlds.
Do readers of Fantasy seek out the genre for a taste of this unsullied environment? Is it nostalgia for the lost Edens of childhood, a way to escape, or to find resilience and inspiration? And in a time of Climate Emergency, is the nature of Fantasy changing to reflect the challenges it presents? Can the blue-sky thinking of the Fantastic provide us with a useful tool for addressing what the United Nations has called ‘the defining crisis of our time’?
BBC New Generation Thinkers finalist, Dr Kevan Manwaring is the MA Creative Writing programme leader at Arts University Bournemouth. He is the author of The Ecological Imaginary in Literature and Other Media: The Nature of Fantasy (Routledge), Writing Ecofiction (Palgrave Macmillan), and Desiring Dragons (Compass Books), and editor of Ballad Tales (The History Press) and Heavy Weather (British Library). A contributor to Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3, he was an Academic Consultant for BBC 4’s The Secret Life of Books. He is a member of the Climate Fiction Writers League and editor of theBritish Fantasy Society Journal.
The HOP talks are part of an initiative aiming to inspire and inform individuals, families and local communities with tangible actions to help combat the effects of climate change and environmental degradation, and to raise money for charities working in these areas. Each month the charity is chosen by the speaker. The project was initiated by Philip Howse OBE (Professor Emeritus, University of Southampton) with Professor Sir Ghillean Prance FRS VMH (former Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) and the late James Lovelock CBE. Patrons include: George Monbiot, Clive Farrell, Dr George McGavin and Dr Kate Rawles.
Take part. Book your seats now.
