Islandeering with Lisa Drewe

In the last fifteen years Lisa Drewe has hiked, biked, run, swum, and kayaked around the outer edge of over 150 of Britain’s islands. Coining the term ‘islandeering’, here she shares her motivation and some favourite routes from her new book.

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Stanfords Bristol awarded Harper Collins Literacy Grant

We are very pleased to announce that Stanfords Bristol has been awarded a £2000 grant to fund a literacy project based in the city centre.

Stanfords Bristol is one of ten independent booksellers in the UK to receive funding for a literacy project initiative funded by publishers Harper Collins, who have pledged £20,000 in grants for independent bookshops to help transform the lives of young people through reading as part of its ongoing commitment to The Literacy Project, launched in 2018.

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Stanfords Bristol to take part in BA/Egmont Eager Readers Project

We are thrilled to announce that Stanfords Bristol will be one of the bookshops participating in the BA/Egmont Eager Readers project, established earlier this year as part of the Bookseller’s Association Diversity & Inclusivity initiative.

The six-week summer reading project aims to inspire reading for pleasure through allowing children to choose their own books and encouraging parents to read to their child on a daily basis. We’ll be working with a primary school in the city centre to sign up local families with a child between the ages of 7 and 11 who is reluctant to read and with parents who find it difficult to make time to read to their child.

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Elsewhere with Rosita Boland

In the last thirty years, Rosita Boland has visited some of the most remote parts of the globe carrying little more than a battered rucksack and a diary. To celebrate the publication of her new book Elsewhere, here she shares with us three offbeat things from her travels.

The weirdest thing I ever saw for sale

I was standing with my rucksack in Florence, waiting for the bus that was going to take me to the hostel. The stop was by a very fancy shop opposite the Dumou, the city’s famous church. You had to ring a bell to go into the shop. I didn’t ring. I knew from looking in the window everything on sale in there was far beyond my budget. Beautiful, handmade leather notebooks. Delicate silver bowls. Hand-blown glass.

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Q&A with Dan Richards

Ahead of his event at Stanfords Bristol this week, author Dan Richards discusses his new book Outpost – an exploration of far-flung shelters in mountains, tundra, forests, deserts and oceans – and answers few of our questions.

What books, authors or novels inspired you in writing Outpost? And what are you reading at the moment?

At the moment I’m reading Brian Dillon’s Essayism and Muriel Spark’s The Finishing School. I tend to read several books at once. Also The Pine Barrens by John McPhee; that’s on my bedside table — but Jan Morris, Joan Didion, Rebecca Solnit, and J.A. Baker have taken me on eye-popping journeys into strange lands. Richard Brautigan, Bob Dylan, George Simenon, Lavinia Greenlaw, Mark Doty, David Bowie, Cate Le Bon, T.S Eliot, Denis Johnson, Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald are a never-ending source of indelible images. I try to furnish my books with as much poetry, art, music and literature as possible and all those fed into Outpost.

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