A Way with Words

Join us as we celebrate ten years of York Festival of Ideas with the help of some of our incredible speakers from the past decade. Our launch event features a reading of A Song of Gladness by acclaimed children’s author Michael Morpurgo.

Join us for an internationally-curated event celebrating the incredible creative force of women through performance and discussion.

A character stands looking at the path ahead. How will the journey unfold? Storyteller Alice Courvoisier recounts tales of travels to the horizon and beyond.

Intonation patterns are part of how we characterise regional accents and dialects. Linguist Sam Hellmuth explores intonational tunes in Middlesbrough and York and how these are changing over time.

Join us for a celebration and discussion of the works of Elena Ferrante with the novels’ translator Ann Goldstein, FT journalist Isabel Berwick and Merve Emre of the University of Oxford.

Find out how French words and phrases lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi with Richard Scholar of Durham University as he explores the fascinating history of French words that have entered the English language.

Take a virtual tour of Thin ice Press, home to historic iron presses and a reproduction common press, and discover how the invention of printing changed the horizons of what was possible.

What were the Science Wars? Does combat rhetoric around Covid and climate change unite or polarise? Our speakers explore the effects of warfare narrative in science, and introduce more productive metaphors in science communication.

Explore atoms in fiction and fact as you discover the past, present and future of atomic thought with Stuart Kenny and Helen Smith of the University of York.

Poet Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body - in her case, one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder.

How genuine are you at communicating who you really are? Duncan Lewis of Eaglei explores how to have the confidence to speak out and make an emotional connection with others.

Why is ‘popular’ fiction often viewed as a form of guilty pleasure? Lydia Zeldenrust of the University of York investigates medieval romances, revealing why literary snobbery is timeless.

Our virtual panel shines a spotlight on the black British-South African writer Noni Jabavu (1919-2008) with her York connection, whose work and fascinating story deserve to be better known.

From childhood to old age, how can literature show us ways to be wiser, more open and more self-aware? Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen reveals why fiction is much more than escapism and entertainment.

Explore representations of British higher education in the Inspector Morse series of books and television programmes with our expert speakers.