Born in 1951 in London. After leaving school Gerard joined the Merchant Navy. After sailing around the world he married in 1969. He became a gardener and worked on private estates. Had four children. He and his wife Linda fostered 220 children. In 1980 Gerard changed profession to become an international mural artist. Because of an illness in 2012 Gerard lost the sight in one eye and no longer paints murals. Whilst recovering he was able to complete the book “But for Ireland I’d not tell her name” which had begun with a visit to his great uncle Joe Collins in 1982.
Gerard’s father was South African and his mother Annie Collins came from Botany (New St.) in Lismore. She moved to London as did most of the Collins family in the forties. They left behind Mossie and Lizzie Collins who lived in Botany until they died. Gerard was fortunate to meet and record Lizzie when she was 99 years old.
Gerard lives in Cornwall and is still painting and working on ideas for new stories.
Details of this year’s festival programme can be found elsewhere on this website.
Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent is a travel writer with a particular love of lengthy and occasionally arduous journeys on two and three wheels. This obsession dates back to 2006 when she co-piloted a pink tuk tuk, Ting Tong, a record-breaking 12,561 miles from Bangkok to Brighton with her friend Jo. Through this trip they raised £50,000 for Mind, were named Cosmopolitan magazine’s ‘Fun, Fearless Females of the Year’ and subsequently wrote Tuk Tuk to the Road.
After twelve years service in the Coldstream Guards, including operational tours in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, Harry Bucknall, 48, worked in the oil and mining industry and as a consultant in the Middle East. He has also produced theatre on the London Fringe, sat on the Olivier Awards Panel and acted as reviewer for Arts Council, London and a number of West End publications.
Lives in Mullagh, County Cavan, Ireland. Cousin of the Irish Kildare born Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. He is the family historian for the Irish Shackletons, whose ancestor founded a Quaker school in Ballitore, County Kildare in 1726. He is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin in Natural Sciences and was awarded his Masters Degree from Ohio State University for work in Arctic Alaska.
Salwa Mohamed Elhamamsy is an Egyptian short stories, travel literature and opinion articles writer. She belongs to the nineties generation of Egyptian writers. Her works reflect deep interest in human and social issues. She also tried to revive the old heritage of Egyptian contemporary writing in a new and socially reformist way. She started writing short stories and editorials since late eighties. Graduated at the Faculty of Mass Communication, Cairo University, she worked as a journalist at Al Ahram Newspaper from 1989 to 1994. Her first short stories collection “Dreams Restrictions” was published in 1993 by the biggest Egyptian Publishing Organization, the Egyptian Book Association. She started writing opinion articles on various social issues and problems from 1995 in several newspapers and magazines in Egypt and some Arab countries. In 2006, Al Ahram Newspaper, the largest Egyptian Newspaper, published Salwa’s first opinion article. Salwa’s writings usually tackle some of the social problems in the Egyptian and Arab societies.
John has published four of his own books and helped
Paul Clements is the author of four travel books about Ireland, as well as works of biography and criticism, and is a contributing writer to three guidebooks to Ireland. His latest book, Wandering Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way: From Banba’s Crown to World’s End (2016) is based on a journey along the west coast by car and bike, on horseback and on foot. Burren Country: Travels through an Irish limestone landscape is a collection of essays described as a love letter to the Burren published in 2011 by the Collins Press. The Height of Nonsense: The Ultimate Irish Road Trip (2005) and Irish Shores, A Journey Round the Rim of Ireland (1993) have both been reprinted in 2016. Paul’s acclaimed biography on the travel writer, actor and singer Richard Hayward, Romancing Ireland, was published in 2014 by Lilliput Press and adapted for BBC television. He has written and edited two books about the travel writer and historian Jan Morris. In 2012, he edited an anthology The Blue Sky Bends Overall, a celebration of ten years of the Immrama Festival of Travel Writing. A regular contributor to The Irish Times, he has written many ‘Irishman’s Diaries’ on cultural life and heritage, and reviews Irish local history books.
Robert Fisk (born 1946, Maidstone, Kent) is a British journalist, currently Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent.
