Cornish author Philip Marsden returns to the festival to discuss his latest book Under A Metal Sky, which begins and ends in our homeland of Cornwall. Chaired by Helen Scales.
Under A Metal Sky traces the dazzling achievements and dark consequences of our ability to extract what we want from the earth, and presents a fascinating new perspective on European history and on our troubled relationship with the natural world.
Since they first discovered the magical properties of minerals and metals, humans have been transformed. Ochre prompted the earliest examples of self-expression and art; tin and copper helped instigate the Bronze Age and later the Industrial Revolution; silver kick-started the engines of global trade and lithium fuels our digital age. Each of these substances generated a leap forward in technology, each one opened the imagination a little further – producing in us amazement and wonder, but also destruction and greed.
Under A Metal Sky begins and ends in Philip Marsden’s homeland of Cornwall, one of the world’s great geological hotspots. Travelling eastwards into Europe, he examines how the extraction of peat propelled the Netherlands to world prominence but also imperilled its very existence. Continuing on up the Rhine into the heart of the continent, he uncovers more stories of potent and tempting resources, from iron-rich meteorites to radium and mercury, and the gold-bearing mountains of Georgia. As he travels, he explores precious seams of ideas, from science to alchemy, mysticism to ecology – and those questing souls who pursued them, like Paracelsus, the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, Goethe, William Blake and Marie Curie.
——————————————————————–
Philip Marsden is the award-winning author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction, including The Bronski House, The Spirit-Wrestlers, The Levelling Sea, Rising Ground and The Summer Isles. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and his work has been translated into fifteen languages. Marsden is a previous winner of a Somerset Maugham Award and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award.