De Waal, Evans and Schumacher to headline Gravity Festival

Kit de Waal, Lissa Evans and Tony Schumacher are headlining this year’s Gravity Festival, with Hamish Hamilton editor Hannah Chukwu also curating events.

The festival, run by the charity The Reader, will take place from 29th September to 2nd October in Liverpool’s Calderstones Park. 

De Waal will talk about the difficulties and joys of growing up poor and mixed race and her belief in love and books, while Evans will be in conversation with screenwriter and author Frank Cotterell-Boyce on children’s books and imagination. Schumacher, the writer behind the BBC show “The Responder”, will discuss his personal experience which inspired the programme. 

Chukwu, series editor of Penguin’s Black Britain: Writing Back, will be curating a day of events with Black writers. She said: “I’m excited to be working with The Reader on curating events as part of Gravity Festival 2022. The Reader is an extraordinary organisation that is pioneering the conversation around bringing literature to those who need it the most.  

“This collaboration will create important conversations about the relationship between literature and representation that will leave audiences feeling inspired and hopeful about the possibilities opened up by more diverse literature.” 

Other highlights include Katherine May in conversation with researcher of autism and literature Melissa Chapple, and journalist Tomiwa Owalade discussing the clear sightedness and sometimes hard truths found in the essays of American writer James Baldwin. 

There will also be a draw-along with V&A award winning author and illustrator Jarvis discussing his latest picture book The Boy with Flowers in his Hair (Walker) while Roosevelt Montas is in conversation with Neil Atkinson and Pranav Sood about how, as a Dominican-born teenager in Queens, New York, great books changed his life. 

Jane Davis, founder of The Reader, said: “I started The Reader because I’d had experiences that showed me that great literature does something very real, very practical, for people. Stories, novels, poems and great scripts of all kinds are valuable because they tell us about who we are.   
“If we share these reading experiences, we learn about each other as well as ourselves. Literature helps us deal with what the writer Jeanette Winterson calls ‘the normal problems of gravity’ and it does it without medicalising our difficult problems. If you think Gravity isn’t for you – I urge you to come anyway, sit, have a cuppa, see what happens.”