THE 2018 Kendal Mountain Literature Festival programme is a packed and diverse programme of events featuring some of

the UK’s foremost authors of nature, landscape and mountain literature.

The much awaited literature festival, now in its second year, takes place at the Brewery Arts Centre and other venues across Kendal from November 16-18 as part of Kendal Mountain Festival, the largest and longest-running annual gathering of the outdoor community in the UK.

Featuring more than 40 authors, poets and writers, including naturalist Mark Cocker, canal laureate Nancy Campbell, mountaineer Graham Hoyland and former hospice scribe Tanya Shadrick, this year's festival takes the theme of Connection to explore the latest and very best outdoor inspired literature from across the UK.

This year’s event includes four book launches, including Waymaking, a Kickstarter funded anthology of prose, poetry and artwork produced by women, inspired by wild places, adventure and landscape.

And Kendal Mountain Festival patron and esteemed mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington will read an eulogy to the fallen alongside a choir of 60 amateur singers. The choir made news headlines earlier this year when they sang from the 14 summits in the Lake District that were gifted to the National Trust in the years after the First World War by the Fell and Rock Climbing Club and private landowners as an act of remembrance.

Also featured during the festival will be an exhibition of artwork by Jenny McLaren.

Festival manager and literature programmer, Paul Scully, said they were thrilled to welcome so many incredible writers to the festival and look forward to being inspired, challenged and provoked by the ideas and imagination of those who have immersed themselves in the natural world.” He added: "At Kendal Mountain Festival, we believe that inspiring young readers and writers in the outdoors is crucial to developing positive environmental attitudes and values, and so this year's festival will feature an array of children’s authors, including Jess Butterworth, David Young and MG Leonard."

Literature has been a central part of Kendal Mountain Festival with the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature hosted at the festival since 2007. The 35th Boardman Tasker Award will take place on Friday, November 17, at the Brewery, when the winner of this year's shortlist will be revealed.

Chairman of judges, Peter Gillman along with Kate Moorehead and Roger Hubank, have the difficult task of selecting the winner from the seven shortlisted books - Nick Bullock, Tides: A Climber’s Voyage; Paolo Cognetti, The Eight Mountains; Ed Douglas and John Beatty, Kinder Scout: The People’s Mountain; Christoph Ransmayr, The Flying Mountain; David Roberts, Limits Of The Known; Doug Scott, The Ogre: Biography Of A Mountain and the Dramatic Story of the First Ascent; and Junko Tabei and Helen Y. Rolfe, Honouring High Places: The Mountain Life Of Junko Tabei.

Kendal Mountain Literature Festival started life in 2017 as a radical expansion to the individual literature events staged as part of the wider Kendal Mountain Festival. Now into its second year, the arts and literature programme is bigger and more exciting than ever before.

Established in 1983 to commemorate the lives of Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, the Boardman Tasker Charitable Trust celebrates their legacy by presenting the annual Award for Mountain Literature to the author of an original work, which has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature.

Robert Macfarlane, acclaimed British writer and Kendal Mountain Literature Festival patron said: "This is among the most diverse

programme of any nature and outdoor festival I’ve seen; so rich in its reach across voices and communities."