These Wild English by Cumbrian born documentary maker Nicola Wilding, is her deeply personal memoir of three generations of her working-class family from the Eden Valley, as they struggle with the forces reshaping modern Britain. It will change how you see the divisions of our age. Nicola will be in conversation with James Rebanks, author and Lake District farmer.
Described by James Rebanks as, "an unforgettable and moving portrait of working-class alienation", These Wild English follows three generations of a working-class family as they struggle with the forces reshaping modern Britain.
Cumbrian-born documentary maker, Nicola Wilding, has turned the lens on her own family in her deeply personal memoir of one working class family and a fractured Britain, charting her mum’s journey from caring for the country’s most vulnerable to joining EDL marches. But the appeal of the far right has consequences that stretch far beyond her family. From the working farms of Cumbria to the windswept shores of Kent, via bleak barracks in Cyprus and Northern Ireland, this book is a rare and tender reckoning with the love, rage, pride and loss of a community and country. It will change how you see the divisions of our age.
Join us for what will be an illuminating and thought-provoking ‘in conversation’ event, as Nicola and James Rebanks discuss These Wild English. As Nicola writes: "how the hell did we end up here? As a family, as a class and as a country?"
"A superb first-hand account of the splintering of a working-class rural family" Joel Budd, author
"A wild ride through a childhood of Angel Delight and Poll Tax Riots, scarred market towns and reviled barracks in Northern Ireland, intergenerational trauma and tough, fierce, wild women who just keep on getting back up" Jonathan Trigell, author
Nicola Wilding grew up in the Eden Valley in Cumbria as part of a rural, working-class family. Now a writer and TV producer, she has spent over two decades making documentaries on subjects such as poverty, class, education and farming.
James Rebanks is a farmer based in the Lake District, where his family have lived and worked for over six hundred years. His No.1 bestselling debut, The Shepherd's Life, won the Lake District Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Ondaatje prizes, and has been translated into sixteen languages. His second book, English Pastoral, was also a Top Ten bestseller and was named the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year. Heralded as a 'masterpiece' by the New Statesman, it was shortlisted for the Ondaatje prize, and longlisted for the Rathbones Folio prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. His 2024 book, A Place of Tides is an account of the time he spent on Fjærøy, a tiny, usually uninhabited island in the Vega archipelago on Norway's west coast, with Anna Måsøy, one of the last traditional 'duck women' who protects wild eider ducks and harvests their down.
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