Literature | Highlights | Kendal Mountain Festival

Kendal Mountain Book Festival

Our Book Festival is an interwoven and much loved part of the award-winning Kendal Mountain Festival, which takes place in Kendal each November. We are currently programming the line-up for our 2025 Festival which will be announced in July!

At its heart, Kendal Mountain Book Festival celebrates and explores our relationships with nature, landscape, people and place sharing ideas, stories, and voices from around the world. Through literature and the arts the Festival provides an opportunity to pause and explore the living world around us.

Our Book Festival Director, Paul Scully says:“Our Festival is a place where we can reflect on our relationships with nature, landscape, society and to each other. A space where people are challenged to be receptive to different ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. We hope you are able to join us, no matter who you are, in this wonderful community of ideas, words and wanderings.”

With all our discussions, talks and performances we hope to immerse our audiences in adventure, overflowing with uplifting optimism and full wonder for the world.

Let us also take this opportunity to thank our patron, Robert Macfarlane for his unwavering support.

Publishers are invited to contact us at paul@mountainfest.co.uk

A word from our patron Robert Macfarlane

2024 Festival theme - Balance

The world is out of kilter –– flying helter-skelter towards the brink. Finding and keeping balance is the work of our time. Balance is justice: scales that weigh equally, without favour or discrimination. Balance is grace: a climber poised on two raisin-sized toeholds, high on El Capitan. Balance is kindness: the hand that reaches out to steady another, to take the weight, to show the way. Balance is symmetry: the land falling steeply away to either side, as you fell-run a ridgeline and think that this is as close to flying as a wingless human could ever get. And balance is harmony: the good step taken, then another, then another –– a tightrope-path picked tentatively, hopefully, towards the possibility of living well and fairly upon this Earth.This year’s Book Festival yearns towards balance in speech, written word, song and musical note. Come, join us: steady yourselves, find firm footing.

What a brilliant festival! I went to so many brilliant book talks. The one event that stands out is the Music On Nature with Rob Macfarlane. It was a very special evening and I have never heard anything like it before. Please can we have more next year!Matthew Scott

I just wanted to say what a blinder of an event the Festival was this year. Great diverse and imaginative content. Truly something for everyone.

Dina Mufti

You could’ve heard a pin drop. George Monbiot imploring that humanity change track. Impeccably steered by Lee Schofield. What a book talk at the Festival.

Sophie Pavelle.

Thank you for inviting us. Thank you to Kendal and the people of the festival for etching a memory into the deepest part of me. It will never fade for it is signed with pigment ink, the pigment of a collective honesty.

Manni Coe

Festival Bookshop

Brewery Arts Centre

Looking for your next read? We’ve got all your bookish needs covered at our Festival bookshop. We will stock all the books from our current programme. Come in for a browse, be inspired and take away a cracking read. Perfect place for buying your Christmas presents.There will be author book signings all weekend.

LITERATURE AWARDS & PRIZES

We are honoured to host two very prestigious literature awards at Kendal...

Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature 2025

Every year we have the honour of hosting this prestigious award at Kendal.

Established in 1983 to commemorate the lives of Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, the Boardman Tasker Charitable Trust celebrates their legacy by awarding the annual Award for Mountain Literature and the Lifetime Achievement Award.

2024 WINNER: Nandini Purandare and Deepa Balsavar - Headstrap, Legends and Lore from the Climbing Sherpas of Darjeeling.

The 2025 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature will return on the 21 November 2025. Tickets will go on sale in July.

Find out more

NATURE CHRONICLES 2024

We are proud to be working alongside the The Nature Chronicles Prize, a brand new nature writing award, a global biennial competition.

Created in memory of Prudence Scott, a lifelong nature diarist who died in 2019, the award aims to find engaging and unique essay length works which share a commitment to truth telling and respond to the time we are in and the world as it is.

We are honoured to host this incredible award, with the winners prize being £10,000! And a further 5 shortlisted writers will receive £1000.

WINNER:

MATT SOWERBY: Hope is the thing with Flippers

The 3rd Nature Chronicles Prize will be held at Kendal Mountain Festival in 2026. Entries will open up later on this year.