Cooking, Eating and Feeling through the Seasons

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In her bestselling memoir, Wintering, Katherine May writes about her own year-long journey through winter, and a time of uncertainty and seclusion. When life felt at its most frozen, she managed to find strength and inspiration from the incredible wintering experiences of others as well as from the remarkable transformations that nature makes to survive the cold. She discovered that personal winters - like winters for the natural world - are times for rest and retreat, care and repair. Winter isn't to be avoided or ignored - it has an important role to play. Not least because without it the joy and renewal of spring would be meaningless.  

The rhythms of the seasons also deeply affect how we feed ourselves as what we want to eat and cook moves with them. In her new book Seasoning: How to cook and celebrate the seasons, award-winning food writer Angela Clutton encourages home cooks to shop, cook and eat in ways that connect with and respect nature’s seasons, and in so doing acknowledge the value of anticipation, surprise, nostalgia and tedium in our food. 

Together they explore the strength and inspiration that come from embracing the rhythms of the year - from how we feed ourselves to surviving our own personal winters. 

Included in Food Season Big Weekend Saturday or Weekend tickets, or available to book as a single session. Discounts available for over 60s and BL Members and half-price tickets for students and under 26s  

Chaired by Leyla Kazim from BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme and Masterchef and whose substack A Day Well Spent espouses a philosophy about time and slow, sustainable living.  

Angela Clutton is an award-winning food writer, cook and presenter. Her latest book (published March 2024) is Seasoning: How to cook and celebrate the seasons. It follows her multi award-winning debut book, The Vinegar Cupboard, and Borough Market: The Knowledge. Angela has worked extensively with Borough Market as host of the Borough Talks podcast,of cookalongs, and the Borough Market Cookbook Club, She is the co-director of the British Library Food Season. 

Leyla Kazim is a travel and food TV and radio presenter, writer and journalist. She is a critic on BBC One's MasterChef, a presenter on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme and a judge for the prestigious annual BBC Food & Farming Awards. Leyla is also the author of the bestselling Substack newsletter A Day Well Spent, for people seeking pathways to purposeful living. Leyla shares her global stories through a number of online and print publications and her social media platforms. 

Katherine May is an internationally bestselling author and podcaster living in Whitstable, UK. Her most recent book Enchantment became an instant New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. Her internationally bestselling hybrid memoir Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times was adapted as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week and was shortlisted for the Porchlight and Barnes and Noble Book of the Year. The Electricity of Every Living Thing, her memoir of a midlife autism diagnosis was adapted as an audio drama by Audible. Katherine’s podcast, How We Live Now, ranks in the top 1% worldwide, and she has been a guest presenter for On Being’s The Future of Hope series.  

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