Thursday 26th June
6.30 to 9pm
Join us for an evening with acclaimed author Tessa McWatt in conversation with Jean McNeil, author of Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet, to celebrate the release of The Snag — a profound exploration of personal and collective grief in a world shaped by climate change and loss.
In The Snag, Tessa reflects on the intertwined griefs we face — the loss of loved ones, the erosion of ways of life, and the broader devastation of climate collapse. As her mother’s dementia progresses, Tessa turns to the natural world for wisdom, finding solace and guidance in the life cycles of trees — from the youngest sapling to the oldest snag in the forest. Through this metaphor, she explores how we can grieve with radical love and live with deeper connection.
Jean McNeil’s Latitudes similarly examines our relationship with the more-than-human world as we witness our intensifying effects on the planet. Together, Tessa and Jean will discuss the intersections of personal loss, environmental grief, and the lessons we can learn from the natural world about resilience, interdependence, and care.
This promises to be a moving and thought-provoking conversation about how we live, how we grieve, and how we grow — even in the face of profound change.
Tessa McWatt is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, the OCM Bocas Prize, and the Society of Authors’ Volcano Prize. She is one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018, for her memoir: Shame on Me: an anatomy of race and belonging, which won the Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction 2020 and was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize and the Governor General’s Award. She has been a resident at the Sacatar Institute in Brazil and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, she is also a librettist, and works on interdisciplinary projects and community-based life writing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Jean McNeil has published fifteen books, spanning fiction, memoir, poetry, essays and travel. Her account of being writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica, Ice Diaries, won both the Adventure Travel and Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival in 2016. Her most recent novel, Day for Night, was awarded the gold medal in the literary fiction category of the Independent Publishers Awards in the US in 2022. Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet, published on March 25th, is a memoir-through-landscape and ranges over wildernesses she has lived and worked in while writing about climate and the environment over the last thirty years. She directs the Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia and lives in London.