Mark Wormald in conversation with Robert Macfarlane

Pembroke Fellow Mark Wormald will speak about his new book, The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes (Bloomsbury Books, April 2022), in conversation with the internationally renowned writer and Fellow of Emmanuel, Robert Macfarlane.

Their discussion is likely to encompass environmental issues, friendship, fathers and sons, fishing and wellbeing; the writing of Ted Hughes and the poetry, rivers and lakes that inspired it; and the evolution of The Catch and Mark’s archival and field research in Devon, Scotland and Ireland, which was supported by Pembroke and the Faculty of English.  

There will be an opportunity for questions from the audience, and a chance to meet over a glass or two once formal proceedings close.

This event, which will be introduced by the Master, is restricted to members of the Pembroke community, including students, Fellows, staff, alumni, friends of the College and representatives of the national funding bodies who made possible the acquisition in 2020 of the Irish painter and fisherman Barrie Cooke’s remarkable literary archive and associated art work. Robert and Mark’s conversation will be filmed, and an edited version will be made available for those unable to attend, and more widely.

The talk will take place on Thursday 23 June, from 6 PM, in Old Library. To register your place, please visit: https://thecatchinconversation.eventbrite.co.uk

The speakers

Robert Macfarlane (Pembroke 1994) is the author of books on nature, people and place, including Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways and The Wild Places, and -- with artist Jackie Morris -- of The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. His work has been published in thirty languages, and widely adapted for film, television, radio, music and stage. He has written films including Mountain (2017) and River (2022), both narrated by Willem Dafoe. In 2017 he was awarded The EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Mark Wormald has been fishing since the age of four. His poems won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford in 1988 and an E. C. Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1995. Mark has been a Fellow in English at Pembroke since 1992. His first office was once the bedsitting room in which Ted Hughes dreamed of a burned fox. Mark has co-edited two collections of essays: Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (2013) and Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture (2018). He is the Chair of the Ted Hughes Society, the co-organizer of two Cambridge conferences, held between Pembroke and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, on the Atlantic salmon (2019) and on chalk streams (2023), both inspired by Ted Hughes, and is co-editor of Wild Fish.