These last few days where spring has felt much more like summer, we’ve been thinking about how much time we can legitimately spend outdoors in the coming months. We’ve already announced our annual four-day trip to east Cornwall for the mighty Port Eliot Festival, which is pretty much the perfect mixture of talk, music and lounging about drinking beer. Now we’re adding another weekender to that one – the Dinefwr Literature Festival in Carmarthenshire.

Located in glorious West Wales over the weekend 29th June – 1st July, Dinefwr is a new arrival in the festival calendar. Their first year line up is fantastic – Gruff Rhys, Iain Sinclair and Julian Cope being just a few of familiar faces that we’re already excited about seeing. They asked us to get involved and, by weird coincidence, it just so happens that we have a disproportionate amount of Friends of the River in Wales. So, we’ll be there all weekend putting on talks in various locations. Our line up at the moment looks like this:

Friday 5pm – Richard King reading from his book How Soon Is Now: The Madmen & Mavericks Who Made Independent Music 1975-2005
Saturday am – Matt Sewell – spotting and jotting 

Saturday 4 – 8 pm – Robert Penn talking about British woodlands / Pat Long reading from his book The History of the NME plus conversation with Richard King 

Neil Ansell reading from Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills
Sunday am – Matt Sewell – bird painting/spotting and jotting and music from Jeb Loy Nichols 

Sunday pm – Tim Burgess reading from his autobiography ‘Tellin’ Stories’ plus conversation with Pat Long

Tickets are available now from the festival’s website. Now, what to do about trying to stay outdoors ’til then…