Wild Medicine

Join us for a revelatory and exuberant discussion between Jay Griffiths and Michael Malay about our relationship to the living world: mischievous, vital and wild.

Jay has written several award-winning books, including Wild: An Elemental Journey and Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time. In her latest work, How Animals Heal Us, she explores how animals offer irresistible medicine. They can heal us as individuals with their vitality, humour and empathy. They offer social remedies too: wolves may be teachers of ethics; bees take collective decisions and monkeys have a sense of justice.

In conversation with celebrated local author Michael Malay, Jay will reflect on the big questions that have always permeated her writing, considering time and the rich wisdoms of Indigenous cultures, and the necessity of challenging the status quo.

Doors will open at 7pm. The Folk House bar will be open, and so will the book stall kindly provided by Heron Books. We’ll start at 7.30pm and finish at 8.30pm.

We would like this event to be accessible to everyone. If you would like to come but cannot afford a ticket, please  do not hesitate to contact us at hello@bristoltalks.co.uk.

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Jay Griffiths was born in Manchester and has lived in Wales since 2001. She won the Discover award for the best first-time author in the USA; the inaugural Orion award and the Hay Festival International Fellowship. She has broadcast and written widely, including for Radiohead and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She is a wild skater, whenever the Welsh lakes freeze.

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Michael Malay is a writer and teacher based in Bristol. He was raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, before moving to Australia with his family at the age of ten. His first book, Late Light, is about migration, extinction and uncharismatic creatures and was awarded the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Top Nature Writing.

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Praise for Jay Griffiths

‘Her work isn’t just good – it’s necessary‘ – Philip Pullman

‘If bravery itself could write, it would write like she does’ – John Berger

‘Jay Griffiths is one of our greatest and most important writers of this and any other time’ – Ed O’Brien, Radiohead

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Praise for How Animals Heal Us

‘No book has changed my thinking about Nature more quickly and more fundamentally than this moving, essential work. Nobody writes about Nature – the world and us in it – with more beauty and grace than Jay Griffiths. She senses connections so deep and so resonant that they ring on and on in my mind.‘ – Brian Eno

‘A wise, deep, and tender account of animal healing for humans, written in lyrical language that sings with compassion. This is one of my favourite books of all time.’ – Pascale Petit

‘A pure praise poem to the more than human world, a poem filled with love, respect and joy. It thrums with wit, wisdom, understanding and research. But mostly the joy of being connected to life, from the smallest insect to the great whales.‘ – Jackie Morris

‘Griffiths has done it again. Done it as no one else can. A surging, deeply resonant hymn to the joys of entanglement with the more-than-human world; a shrewd, funny, tender, downright clever mapping of the human soul; a celebration of the potency of relationship; a prescription that can heal and save, if we’ll take it, and an astringent political antiseptic. Literally marvellous, urgently important and compellingly readable.’ – Charles Foster 

‘How Animals Heal Us is a book of boundless passion and compassion. As she explores the worlds of animals, Jay Griffiths make the case for a different way of living: a joyous, vital inclusivity. This is how a book should be – genuinely mind-expanding.’ – Tom Bullough

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