Writing about travel and places features strongly in this month’s literary festivals.

Speakers at the Sherborne Literary Festival (Oct 12-16; sherborneliterarysociety.com/festival) will include Tim Moore, author of The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold (see previous post), and Tom Fort, author of Channel Shore: From the White Cliffs to Land’s End.

Speakers at the Wells Festival of Literature (Oct 14-22; wellsfestivalofliterature.org.uk) will include Arkady Ostrovsky, a Russian-born British journalist and author of The Invention of Russia – The Journey From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War; Gaia Vince, author of Adventures in the Anthropocene, which investigates man’s impact on the planet; Alexandra Harris, author of Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies, which was shortlisted this year for the RSL Ondaatje Prize for a book “evoking the spirit of a place”; Ben Rawlence, author of City of Thorns – Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp; and Colin Thubron, who is better known as a travel writer but will be introducing his new novel, Night of Fire.

Speakers at Dundee Literary Festival (Oct 19-23; literarydundee.co.uk) will include Donald S Murray, author of Herring Tales: How the Silver Darlings Shaped Human Taste and History; Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun, a memoir of alcoholism and recovery on Orkney that won this year’s Wainwright Prize; and Malachy Tallack, author of the acclaimed 60 Degrees North, whose latest book, illustrated by Katie Scott, is The Un-Discovered Islands: An Archipelago of Myths and Mysteries, Phantoms and Fakes.

Speakers at the Wantage (Not Just Betjeman) Festival (Oct 22-30; wantagebetjeman.com) will include Patrick Dillon, a cultural ecologist, who has collaborated with his daughter Anna, an artist, and Eric Jones, an environmental historian, on Middle Ridgeway, a book about the prehistoric long-distance path; the broadcaster and writer Nicholas Crane, whose latest book is The Making of the British Landscape; and the explorer Jason Lewis, the first person to circumnavigate the Earth using human power, a feat recounted in his trilogy The Expedition.