Jacki Hill-Murphy MA, FRGS, is an explorer, writer and speaker who has travelled to some of the most inhospitable places on earth to re-create the journeys of daring women adventurers from the past. In tracking valiant women who left inhibition at home and journeyed into the unknown, Hill-Murphy pays tribute to their invincible spirits and achievements.
She has followed in the footsteps of Victorian explorers Isabella Bird who travelled by yak across the Digar-La in Ladakh, India; Mary Kingsley, who pioneered the route to the 13,255 summit of Mount Cameroon; and Kate Marsden who trudged from Moscow to Siberia in search of a cure for leprosy. Hill-Murphy also braved piranha-infested waters in a dugout canoe to replicate the 1769 expedition of Isabel Godin, the only survivor of a 42-person, 4000-mile expedition along the Amazon River. Jacki says: “We are all adventuresses who need to travel to be who we are and we are better people for it.” She has written two books: ‘Adventuresses, rediscovering daring voyages into the unknown’ and ‘The Extraordinary Tale of Kate Marsden and my journey across Siberia in her footsteps’ and numerous stories and articles about her project.
Website: www.jackihill-murphy.co.uk
Twitter: @jackihillmurphy
Details of this year’s festival programme can be found elsewhere on this website.
Rosemary Mahoney was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1961. She was educated at Harvard College and Johns Hopkins University and has been awarded numerous awards for her writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (US), a Whiting Writers Award, a nomination for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award (US), and Harvard’s Charles E. Horman Prize for writing. She is the author of five books of non-fiction: The Early Arrival of Dreams; A Year in China, a New York Times Notable Book, Whoredom in Kimmage; The World of Irish Women, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman, and he Singular Pilgrim; Travels on Sacred Ground. Her travelogue, Down the Nile; Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff, was among the National Book Critics’ Circle’s Best Books of 2007 and was selected by writer Jan Morris for Conde Nast Traveller’s list of the best travel books of all time. Her most recent book, For the Benefit of Those Who See; Dispatches from the World of the Blind, is based on her experiences teaching at the Braille Without Borders schools for the blind in both Lhasa, Tibet and Kerala, India.
Michael Smith is a best-selling author whose book, An Unsung Hero, the biography of explorer Tom Crean, opened a new chapter in Irish history and stimulated widespread interest in Ireland’s role in Polar exploration. An Unsung Hero has been translated into the languages of China, Germany, Italy and Korea and has encouraged a number of spin-offs, including a successful stage play and songs. Crean’s story has since been popularised for children through the successful adaptation, Tom Crean – Iceman and Fear San Oighear, the Irish language edition for younger readers. Tom Crean’s story has since been adopted onto the national curriculum in Irish schools.
Spellbound by his grandmother’s Anglo-Indian heritage and the exuberant annual visits of her friend the Begum, Isambard became enthralled by Pakistan as an intrepid teenager, eventually working there as a foreign correspondent during the war on terror. Seeking the land behind the headlines Bard sets out to discover the essence of a country convulsed by Islamist violence. What of the old, mystical Pakistan has survived and what has been destroyed? His is a funny hashish and whiskey scented travel book from the frontline, full of open hearted delight and a poignant lust for life.
