The bill for the spring festival at Daunt Books in London (March 15-16) includes a session on “Island life” featuring two writers who have recently gone offshore to good effect (and who both happen to be published by Granta). Madeleine Bunting, author of Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey, which was short-listed for the 2017 Wainwright Prize for nature/travel writing focused on Britain, will be interviewed by Patrick Barkham, whose Islander: A Journey Around Our Archipelago, was short-listed for Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.

  Daunt’s, whose Marylebone branch is one of my favourite bookshops in London,  is also a publisher, whose recent titles have included a reissue of John McPhee’s The Crofter and the Laird, which is also about an island: Colonsay. I see, too, that Daunt Books Publishing is to publish in Britain Hernán Diaz’s debut novel In the Distance, which I mentioned on its US publication last year. There’s a link from the company’s site to a short Paris Review interview with Diaz.