Each year the Borris House Festival of Writing & Ideas gathers together fiction writers, historians, journalists, broadcasters, filmmakers, photographers, war correspondents and musicians for a riveting weekend of dialogue and discussion. This year, over 70 speakers will descend on the idyllic village of Borris, County Carlow for a three-day gathering designed to inspire, 7-9 June.
The British Council is delighted to partner with the festival and to support the following UK writers:
Lemn Sissay MBE is a poet, playwright and broadcaster. He has read poetry all over the world and was the first poet commissioned to write for the London Olympics. His Landmark Poems can be found in public spaces from The Royal Festival Hall in London to The British Council Offices in Addis Ababa. Lemn was the official poet for The FA Cup 2015 and his Desert Island Discs was pick of the year for BBC Radio 4 in 2015. Lemn is Chancellor of The University of Manchester, Patron of The Letterbox Club, Canterbury’s Poet Laureate and Trustee of The Foundling Museum and Manchester International Festival.
Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979 and now lives in Norwich. She has a PhD in creative writing from Royal Holloway and has been a writer-in-residence at the Savoy Hotel, Gladstone’s Library and for Prague – UNESCO City of Literature. Sarah is the author of After Me Comes the Flood (2014) and the Sunday Times bestsellers, The Essex Serpent (2016) and Melmoth (2018). Her second novel, The Essex Serpent, sold over 500,000 copies in the UK alone and was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2016.
