BBC to host the Big Book Weekend this May
David Farnor | On 20, Apr 2020
Festivals may be cancelled this summer, but the BBC will be bringing the literary world together for the Big Book Weekend this May.
For the full schedule, click here
The three-day virtual festival aims to bring together the best of the cancelled UK literary festivals over the first bank holiday weekend in May. Co-founded by the authors Kit de Waal and Molly Flatt with support from BBC Arts, the online book festival site MyVLF and Arts Council England, it will comprise video interviews, panel discussions and more, alongside archive conversations and film adaptations of books.
Killing Eve creator Luke Jennings will be in conversation with crime novelist Sarah Hilary. The series started life as a group of self-published novellas, with an avid audience of devoted fans, before becoming one of the biggest TV hits of recent years.
Contagion will see Adam Kucharski in conversation with Tim Hubbard. Why and how do ideas, false news and diseases spread? And how, in an increasingly small world, can we control them? Kucharski is an associate professor at the London School Of Hygiene And Tropical Medicine, a TED fellow, a Wellcome Trust prize-winner, and has worked on global outbreaks including Ebola and Covid-19. Delving into his new book The Rules Of Contagion, he will talk to Hubbard about what the world is experiencing now, and how new mathematical approaches are transforming what we know about contagion in all its forms.
To mark the 200th Anniversary Of Anne Brontë’s birth, Adjoa Andoh, Jackie Kay and Isabel Greenberg will also be in conversation with Cathy Newman, alongside a collection of conversation, graphic artworks and live readings from The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall.
The full line up will be revealed at the end of the month.