About this Event
books on the walls is over the moon that Brigid is back with her new, award winning publication. In this exceptional and joyous memoir, she swims her way back to life by seeking to plunge into every one of Scotland’s thirty thousand ice-cold lochs. After Brigid Lowe’s life is upended, she turns to Scotland’s wild waters for refuge and for reckoning. Drawn deeper by their bone cold comfort, she set herself a challenge: to swim a thousand lochs. Shiver is a love-letter to Scotland – its flowers and rocks, myths and legends, highlands and islands – and to its chill waters, which swept Brigid off her feet only to carry her back home again.
Brigid grew up in a remote Welsh-speaking community on Ynys Môn, with her younger sister and Irish immigrant parents. She now lives with her children in that part of Scotland known as Yr Hen Ogledd – The Old North – formerly joined with Wales in one Cumbric nation. She studied literature at Bangor, completed a doctorate at Oxford, and went on to teach and research at Sheffield and Cambridge Universities.
We first met Brigid earlier on in the year, with her debut novel, The Bloody Branch, the first in a sequence of retellings of the founding Welsh myths of the Mabinogion.
As clear and magical as the Highland lochs and as filled with colour as the Hebridean seas in which she swims. Annie Worsley, author of Windswept
Luminous, graceful, and immersive... its greatest gift lingers long after the final page is closed, like a long-forgotten call to return to the watery world of our wild selves. Victoria Bennett, author of The Apothecary By the Sea
Winner of the RSL Giles St Aubyn Award for non-fiction
Featured on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour
The books on the walls bar and barista service will be in operation for the event.
Event venue & nearby stays
books on the walls, 2 City Walls, Chester, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.