Andrew Miller | The Land in Winter
Wed 22 Apr 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:00pm
What an utter treat to open the Festival with prize-winning Andrew Miller and his acclaimed novel The Land in Winter – a masterclass in storytelling, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. With its flawless evocation of time and place, the novel transports us to the ferocious winter of 1962–63, the harshest in living memory, where two young marriages are quietly and profoundly tested.
As blizzards close in on a West Country village, secrets surface, hopes falter and the ordinary business of living becomes both difficult and necessary. Tender, immersive and psychologically acute, The Land in Winter explores love, duty, regret and resilience with luminous prose and extraordinary emotional precision. Come and hear Andrew Miller discuss a novel widely praised as one of his finest achievements, and discover why he is regarded as one of Britain’s most subtle, daring and dazzling chroniclers of the human heart.
Chaired by broadcaster Alex Clark.
Venue: Palmerston Room
Duration: 1 hour
Tickets available soon.
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Author Biography
Andrew Miller‘s first novel, Ingenious Pain won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour Prize. It has been followed by Casanova, Oxygen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001, The Optimists, One Morning Like A Bird, Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2011, The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, which was the winner of the Highland Book Prize, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, a Waterstones Book of the Month, and a Book of the Year pick in the New Statesman, Guardian and Spectator, and his most recent novel, The Slowworm’s Song. Andrew’s novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.
Chair Biography
Alex Clark is a broadcaster and journalist, who writes for many publications including the Guardian, the Observer, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is a co-host on the Graham Norton Book Club for Audible and hosts the TLS podcast. She is a professional chairperson and appears all over the UK at Cheltenham, Hay and the Southbank Centre. Alex is a festival Honorary Patron.
