FBF: Luke Thompson: A Cornish Bestiary

Did you hear about the Redruth girl who vomited snails? Or how the saint of Gunwalloe saved his sister’s eye from a goose? Can you cure warts with a slug, or whooping cough with spiders?

Cornwall is a landscape thick with stories. For centuries its cliffs, moors, mines, villages and coves have been populated not only by people, but by a remarkable menagerie of real and imagined creatures. Folklore has always been part of the way Cornwall makes sense of its landscape and its history, preserving memories, fears and beliefs that pass from one generation to the next.

In A Cornish Bestiary, writer and publisher Luke Thompson goes in search of the animals and creatures that have inhabited the Cornish imagination. There are familiar favourites including the red-eyed Owlman, ominous Black Dogs and the iconic Cornish Chough, but also Camborne’s frog king, Ladock’s feathered fiend, a horrifying plague of flies and the curious absence of wolves.

Drawing on natural history and folklore, old newspapers, broadside ballads, legends and local tales, Luke uncovers a Cornwall in which the boundaries between human and animal, history and myth, fact and storytelling are rarely as fixed as they first appear.

Funny, strange and occasionally macabre, A Cornish Bestiary is also a celebration of the stories that attach us to a place and to the other creatures with which we share it.

Find out more about Falmouth Book Festival here: https://www.falmouthbookfestival.com/

Falmouth Book Festival: Luke Thompson: A Cornish Bestiary

Sunday 25th October 12.00pm

Tickets: £7.00/£10.00

A £1 Poly Fund payment is added to each ticket sold. A 50p booking fee is also applied per ticket for online and telephone transactions.