Taking Up Space

About

Come and venture outdoors with Brighton Book Festival as we explore the gatekeeping of open spaces.

Why is it that our open spaces seem to be for a select few?

Come and be inspired by those who are reclaiming open spaces and discovering what it is like to find a new freedom in the great outdoors.

The Brighton Book Festival is grateful to the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex for sponsoring this event. The University of Sussex is a leading international centre for life history research, oral history, and life writing research and teaching. University of Sussex researchers have published extensively in the fields of oral history and life writing, and have initiated pioneering training courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Corinne Fowler is a public historian who has walked the length of Britain to explore the countryside’s many connections to colonialism. A professor of colonialism and heritage, she directed Colonial Countryside, a widely acclaimed child-led history and writing project, from 2018 to 2022. She is the co-author of the 2020 National Trust report on its country houses' historical links to the British Empire. The report won the prestigious Museums and Heritage Special Judges’ award and the Eastern Eye award, prompting similar initiatives across the heritage and museums sectors. Fowler’s work inspires many as she continues to advocate for evidence-based conversations which promote empathy, reconciliation and repair.

Peter Kalu is a multi-award-winning writer who most recently received the Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship Award 2024 for ‘impressively experimental, thoughtful and challenging’ writing. His poetry can be found in Mongrel Moon and scattered across anthologies. His short stories can be found in Colonial Countryside (Peepal Tree 2024) Collision (comma press 2023), Glimpse (Peepal Tree 2023), Lancashire Stories (Lancashire Libraries 2023), Closure (Peepal Tree 2015), Seaside Special (Bluemoose 2018) and A Country To Call Home (Unbound 2017). His essays can be found at writersmosaic.com and Encounters with James Baldwin (Supernova 2024). His forthcoming essay-memoir collection is Act Normal (HopeRoad 2025). He was writer in residence at University of West Indies (Trinidad campus) in 2020 and was part of an international team that created the story architecture for the RPG Game Simulacrum Funk.

Ayanna Lloyd Banwo (b.1980) is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Her debut novel When We Were Birds was the 2023 winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, and the American Book Award. It was also shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and the McKitterick Prize and named one of the UK Observer’s Best Debuts and The Economist’s Best Books of 2022. Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in Moko Magazine, Small Axe and PREE, among others and shortlisted for the Small Axe Literary Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She is the 2023 winner of the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award and was named a 2024 Rising Star in UK writing by The National Centre for Writing and The British Council. She currently lives in Norwich and is at work on her second novel.