| Date | Sunday March 28th |
| Venue | Online |
| Time | 11am |
| Cost | €5 - €10 |
| Age | Adult |
The Festival Bookseller for this event is The Gutter Bookshop.
For as long as she can remember, author Cathy Rentzenbrink has lost and found herself in stories. Growing up, she was rarely seen without her nose in a book and read in secret long after lights out. When tragedy struck, books kept her afloat. Eventually they lit the way to a new path, first as a bookseller and then as a writer. No matter what the future holds, reading will always help. Join Cathy in the company of author Kit de Waal for what promises to be a moving, funny and joyous exploration of how books can change the course of your life, packed with recommendations from one reader to another.
Cathy Rentzenbrink is the author of The Last Act of Love and A Manual for Heartache and Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books. She speaks and writes regularly on life, death, love, literature, literacy and mental health. In previous lives Cathy worked for The Bookseller, The Reading Agency, Quick Reads, Waterstones and The Bell & Crown Inn. In her 2015 memoir, The Last Act of Love, she related the sudden loss and slow death of her younger brother Matty after an accident had left him in a persistent vegetative state. Her effort to stiff-upper-lip through the grief led to years of drinking and depression; in A Manual for Heartache, she took a self-help approach, using what she had learnt from that experience to offer tender advice for the bereaved.
Kit de Waal was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother and a Caribbean father. She has published two novels, My Name is Leon and The Trick to Time. My Name is Leon, her debut novel, was an international bestseller and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year in 2016. Her second novel, The Trick to Time, followed in April 2018. She established the Kit de Waal Creative Writing Scholarship at Birkbeck University to help improve working-class representation in the arts.
