Jack Monroe - The 2022 Catherine Cookson Lecture

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The Hastings Book Festival is pleased to announce that the 2022 Catherine Cookson Lecture will be given by the hugely influential author, columnist, blogger and anti-poverty campaigner, Jack Monroe.

Once a single mother trying to feed her young son on a minuscule budget, Jack has gone on to become a voice for those in society struggling with food poverty. And people are listening.

Thanks to Jack’s activism, supermarkets have been pressured into reducing the cost of basic foodstuffs and government has had to rethink the way it gathers its information on pricing.

In this lecture, Jack will talk from first-hand experience about food poverty and the need for systemic change.

A powerful champion of the poor and overlooked in our society, Jack is the ideal person to give this lecture which was set up in Catherine Cookson’s name.

Dame Catherine Cookson was born illegitimate and in poverty but went on to become the most popular British novelist of the twentieth century, selling over 100 million copies of her novels worldwide and making a fortune from her writing. The lecture is given each year during the Hastings Book Festival to ‘celebrate the voices of working class women writers’ and ‘to provide a platform for voices that are not always listened to, or have been silenced or forgotten’.

At the end of the event, a collection will be held for the Hastings and St Leonards Foodbanks.

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(📸  photo of Jack Monroe by Fox Fisher)