Otley Bookfest 2026 - Landscapes

Landscapes

Sunday 29 November • Doors 5pm • 5.30pm – 7.30pm

Wesley Hall, Walkergate, Otley

Dr Morag Rose closes the festival with an evening on place and how we write it. She's a walker and researcher who founded Manchester's Loiterers Resistance Movement, a group that has met monthly since 2006 to wander the city and pick apart the stories hidden in it. With her: Rob Cowen, whose Common Ground turned a scrap of edgeland outside Harrogate into a book people still talk about; novelist Jenn Ashworth; and Heather Dawe, who writes and makes art about the hills she rides and runs through.

Rob Cowen

Rob Cowen is an award-winning writer, hailed as one of the UK’s most original voices on nature, place and people. His first book, Skimming Stones, won the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors. His second book, Common Ground (PRH; 2015) was shortlisted for the Portico, Richard Jefferies Society and Wainwright Prizes and voted one of the nation’s favourite nature books of all time in a BBC poll.

His follow-up, The Heeding (E&T; 2021), was the best-selling debut book of poetry in 2021. His latest book, The North Road (PRH; 2025) was released in April, 2025. Rob was previously a journalist writing on nature and travel and he has contributed to the New York Times, the Guardian and the Independent and written radio programmes for the BBC. He lives in North Yorkshire.

Jenn Ashworth

Jenn Ashworth was born in Preston and studied at Cambridge and Manchester. Her novels include A Kind of Intimacy, The Friday Gospels and Fell. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

In 2019 she published Notes Made While Falling, a memoir told in a series of essays. Her latest novel is Ghosted: A Love Story. She is a Professor of Writing at Lancaster University.

Heather Dawe

Heather is an Otley-based painter and writer.

She has written several books about her time spent in the mountains, climbing, running and cycling – they include A Bicycle Ride in Yorkshire, Adventures in Mind, and her latest book Think Again, on AI, mountains and intuition.

Think Again draws together two parts of Heather's life that might look unrelated — a career working with data and artificial intelligence, and a lifetime spent moving through mountains. It is an exploration of intuition: what it is, where it comes from, and what is at stake as we hand more and more of our thinking to machines. Think Again will be published in North America in October 2026 and in the UK in November 2026.

Her paintings, in oil, pastel and watercolour, are inspired by mountains and the light that moves across them. 

Tickets £10 (Plus a small booking fee)

We want everyone to feel welcome at Otley Common. If you have any access requirements or need any support to attend this event, please get in touch with us before the day and we'll do our best to help. hello@otleycommon.org