Guernsey Literary Festival 2025

Michelin-Starred chef Tom Kerridge, garden designer and BBC presenter Adam Frost and acclaimed novelist and creative writing teacher Kit de Waal are among the early speakers signed for the 2025 Guernsey Literary Festival, which runs from 25 April to 4 May.

There will also be a very special book and music event, at which singer-songwriter Roxanne de Bastion will discuss how she uncovered her family’s dramatic history when she inherited a piano which had been in the family for 100 years, as well as give a special related live music performance.

Tom Kerridge, who runs the only two Michelin-starred pub in the UK plus several other restaurants, is a popular figure on television cooking programmes, both as expert demonstrator and competition judge. He will talk about his life, career and his latest book, The BBQ Book: 80 Delicious Recipes for Fire and Coals, on 1 May at St James. His event is sponsored by Lancaster.

Adam Frost, a regular presenter on BBC’s Gardener’s World, is passionate about plants, and his talk, For the Love of Plants: Celebrate the Joy of Plants Every Day, will be on Wednesday 30 April at St Pierre Park. Afterwards, he will take part in an Ask the Garden Experts panel with Raymond Evison of Guernsey Clematis and Sasha Marsh of The Soil Farm. This event is sponsored by St Pierre Park Hotel.

Kit de Waal’s latest book The Best of Everything is a novel about the meaning of kindness, and the love that can steal into our lives – in spite of the best laid plans. Kit will talk about her book and her award-winning writing career, from her first novel My Name is Leon to her memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes, on Saturday 3 May at the Guille Allès Library and will be hosting a memoir-writing workshop at Les Cotils the following day. Kit is passionate about encouraging writers, especially from more diverse and working class backgrounds.

When her father died, Roxanne de Bastion inherited a piano she knew had been in her family for over a hundred years. But it was only when she found a cassette recording of her grandfather, Stephen de Bastion, playing one of his compositions that the true and almost unbelievable history of the piano, this man and her family began to unravel. By piecing together his cassette recordings, unpublished memoirs, letters and documents, Roxanne sings out her grandfather’s extraordinary story of music and hope and how he survived the horrors of the Holocaust in Hungary.

Main picture: Tom Kerridge (Credit: Cristian Barnett)