Lake District farmer James Rebanks, one of the speakers at this year’s Bridport Literary Festival, has just had his second book published.

Author of the bestselling The Shepherd’s Life, Rebanks will be at the festival on Saturday, November 7 at the Electric Palace, along with H is for Hawk author Helen Macdonald. She has just brought out a collection of nature writing essays entitled Vesper Flights.

James Rebanks’ grandfather taught him as a boy to work the land the old way. The farm in the Lake District hills, which had been worked by his family for over 600 years, was part of an ancient landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife.

By the time James inherited the farm, though, it was barely recognisable. The men and women had vanished from the fields, the old stone barns had crumbled and the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song.

The Shepherd’s Life, won the Lake District Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Ondaatje prizes, and has been translated into 16 languages.

Author Philip Pullman said: "Rebanks writes so well that I can’t imagine anyone starting to read it and not being eager to read it all at once, as I did, and not being moved by the life and the landscape he describes so well. I was thrilled by it."

Rebanks’ latest book, English Pastoral, is the story of an inheritance one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world have been brought close to collapse, and the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things are being lost.

Yet this elegy from the fells is also a song of hope: how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future.

This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against all the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.

Bridport Literary Festival runs from November 4 to 7 at Bridport Arts Centre and The Electric Palace. An online brochure will be at bridlit.com. Tickets will be available online and at Bridport Tourist Information Centre, 01308 424901.

Events are being rotated between the two venues, which will have configured seating to enable social distancing. They will be thoroughly cleaned and sanitised before and after each event.