Past event

Letters Live Wilderness 2024

Date:
2-4 August 2024

Anyone who has witnessed the spectacle that is Letters Live at Wilderness can attest that it is one of the finest hours of entertainment you will ever experience.

 

As headliners of the festival’s Talks and Debates programme, Letters Live brought a top-secret cast of readers to read some of the greatest correspondence ever written, across two shows at Wilderness 2024.

 

Letters Live is inspired by Shaun Usher’s best-selling Letters of Note, and by Simon Garfield’s To the Letter. Our mission has always been the same: to harness the unrivalled power of old-fashioned correspondence and breathe new life into the stories contained within letters with the help of an ever-changing cast of some of the most acclaimed performing talent from around the world.

 

CREDITS

Anonymous listener to Dr. Laura Schlessinger, © J. Kent Ashcraft; Valentine Ackland to Sylvia Townsend Warner, © the Estate of Valentine Ackland; Oscar Brittle to Sydney Morning Herald, © Glenn Fowler, Christopher Smyth and Gareth Malone, 2009; Lucia Berlin to Kenwood Elmslie, 9th September 2001 “Coupling is ridiculous, really”, used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Copyright © 2022. All Rights reserved.; Fiona Glen to Earth, © Fiona Glen. This letter is a part of the Letters to the Earth campaign, which began in 2019, when people around the world were invited to put pen to paper and write letters in response to the climate and ecological emergency. An excerpt is published in their book ‘Letters to the Earth: Writing to a Planet in Crisis’; Frances Hodgkins to her sister, © The estate of Frances Hodgkins; Thatcher Jensen to The Lady Selling Seashells by the Seashore, © Thatcher Jensen; Franz Kafka to Felice, LETTERS TO FELICE by Franz Kafka, translated by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth. Used by permission of Schocken Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC; Harry Rowohlt to Friends, © by Kein & Aber AG Zurich – Berlin; Robert Priosh to various, © the Estate of Robert Pirosh; Julie Scagell to her son’s recorder, © Julie Scagell; Hannah Scorer to Boots, © Hanner Scorer; Dylan Thomas to Margaret Taylor, © The Dylan Thomas Trust, by permission of David Higham Associates; Remedios Varo to A Stranger, © Margaret Carson and Remedios Varo; Kurt Vonnegut to Jane Cox, ‘I still need my mother terribly’ by Kurt Vonnegut. Copyright © Kurt Vonnegut, 1967, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited; E. B White to William Shawn, Copyright © 2006 by White Literary LLC. Recited with permission of White Literary LLC;