The 2026 Gwenda Matthews Talk - Join us to hear Sarah discussing Helm, which was inspired by the dramatic views of the fells and skies from her childhood home, and was 20 years in the making.
Sarah Hall ’s much celebrated sixth novel, Helm, was selected as this year’s winner of the Lakeland Book of the Year Award. It is the story of Helm, a ferocious, mischievous wind – a subject of folklore and wonder – who has blasted the sublime landscape of the Eden Valley since the very dawn of time. But now Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears that human pollution is killing Helm.
"So brilliantly and beautifully written it will suck you in like a whirlpool. She writes about landscape and emotions like nobody else." Val McDermid, author
"I'm awed. I wouldn't think a novel could be at once so taut and so multifarious, expanding one’s sense of what fiction can do" Sarah Moss, author
Sarah Hall is a two-time Booker Prize nominee, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys and The Commonwealth Writers Prizes, the author of six novels and three short-story collections. Notably, she is the only author to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice: first in 2013 with Mrs Fox and again in 2020 with The Grotesques.
This is the inaugural Gwenda Matthews Talk, remembering our much-loved festival co-founder and co-programmer, who died in January this year. Gwenda was the founder and owner of Bookcase and Bookends in Carlisle and Keswick.
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