Apr
15
5:00pm
Caroline Eden on Red Sands
By Shute Festival
Caroline Eden will be talking with fellow writer Sophie Ibbotson about her latest book intertwining food, travel and people, Red Sands. Caroline is a writer and critic contributing to The Guardian, BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent and The Times Literary Supplement. She is the author of four books, all of which focus on the Turkic-speaking world: Samarkand (2016), Black Sea (2018), The Land of the Anka Bird (2020) and Red Sands (2020). Lit up by emblematic recipes, Red Sands is filled with human stories, forgotten histories and tales of adventure, while bringing in universal themes that relate to us all: hope, hunger, longing, love and the joys of eating well on the road. Beginning on the shores of the Caspian Sea, in oil-rich Kazakhstan, the story heads into the kitchens of underground desert mosques, through the world’s largest walnut forests in Kyrgyzstan, to remote orchards in Tajikistan, into cafés and canteens in Uzbekistan’s leafy capital and to dining rooms in Soviet-era sanatoriums, all the while exploring how food mirrors and shapes landscapes, history and culture. Red Sands was featured in various ‘best books of 2020’ lists, including BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme, Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Week and The New Yorker. Tim Hayward, writing in The Financial Times, wrote: ‘Eden continues her explorations, not just of fascinating and often under-reported places, but also of the boundaries between reportage, travel and food. There is nobody writing about food at the moment who’s committed to this level of immersion and it rings out in every line.’
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Shute Festival
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