Lamorna Ash & Lisa Woollett

Two lively meditations on our relationship with the sea and shoreline which are also memoirs. As part of her postgraduate cultural anthropology masters, Lamorna Ash elected to return to her mother’s Cornish roots to embed herself in Newlyn’s fishing community. There she experienced first-hand the brutal lessons of life at sea and came to appreciate both the challenges facing an industry in peril and the privileges she had taken for granted. The result, Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town has struck a chord with a forcibly isolated public and been Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Cornwall-based Lisa Woollett’s Rag and Bone celebrates the environmentally friendly pleasures of picking over what the waters throw up, from mudlarking on the Thames to beachcombing in the far west, while charting her family’s association with recycling what others throw out. We’re delighted that Lamorna and Lisa will be in conversation with the BBC’s Petroc Trelawny, presenter of Radio 3's Breakfast and author of an upcoming memoir on his Cornish boyhood and enduring love of trains.

Lamorna has completed a degree in English at Oxford, a masters in Social and Cultural Anthropology at UCL and is currently an education worker at the charity Into University. She writes for the Times Literary Supplement and TANK Magazine. As well as reviewing for film and theatre, Lamorna has written seven plays.
Follow Lamorna on Twitter: @LamornaAsh.
To read a review of Dark, Salt, Clear in the Guardian click here.
To read a review in the FT click here.
To read a review in The Spectator click here.
To watch Lamorna giving a reading on the Seasalt website click here. 
To watch Lamorna’s short film made as part of our NCBF At Home season, click here.

Lisa Woollett's family have found value in what is thrown away for generations — her great grandfather was a scavenger and her grandfather was a dustman, while she herself has been a beachcomber all her life, and in recent years has taken photographs of her beach and river finds. She is the author of two award-winning photography books about the sea, and Rag and Bone won a Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-Fiction. She has lived in Cornwall with her family since 2004, in a house shared with buckets and boxes of shore finds.
Follow Lisa on Twitter: @WoollettLisa.
To read a review of Rag and Bone in The Guardian click here. 
To read one in the Evening Standard, click here. 
And to read one in Literary Review, click here. 
Visit Lisa’s website where you can also enjoy her maritime photography.
To watch the short film Lisa made as part of our NCBF At Home season, click here.

To watch the short film Petroc made as part of our NCBF At Home season, which includes a preview of his memoir, click here.

Lamorna's photograph © Frederick Wilkinson.