SHERBORNE Travel Writing Festival has never felt more important than this year, when our international travel possibilities seem so fragile and risky. Over the weekend 10th to 12th April, speakers at the Powell Theatre in Abbey Road will take audiences on journeys of adventure, history, nature, deep into today’s fractured and dangerous world.

Curated by travel writer Rory Maclean, the festival has an impressive line-up, including Peter Frankopan, author of the global phenomenon The Silk Road, and the award-winning young Scottish writer Jen Stout.

Now in its fourth year, the Sherborne event was the first travel literature festival to be held in the UK for many years and has developed its own unique character. At its heart is the idea – and the timely theme – of empathy.

“Travel writers are bridge-builders, venturing out into the world to understand different peoples, cultures and times,” says Rory Maclean. “Empathy lies at the heart of our work and the fundamental belief that through better understanding others we can better counter the division and isolation of the present day.”

So this an invitation to travel on foot, by boat, with wolves, from the Holy Land to Kiev, in the company of 12 of the UK’s leading travel writers, thinkers, historians and broadcasters.

Peter Frankopan will be talking about his new book, The Earth Transformed, asking what lessons the past can teach us about the challenges of today and tomorrow. Are we living through the birth of a new world order – and, if so, what shape might it take?

The Silk Roads was a number one international bestseller that transformed the way we think about history, shifting the story of civilisation from its familiar Western axis to the vibrant networks of the East. Ten years on, those same routes are once again at the heart of global change. From Russia’s war in Ukraine and the current turmoil in the Middle East to tensions over Taiwan and the rivalry between India, Pakistan and China, the old crossroads of empire, trade and culture are once more shaping world events.

The war in Ukraine is the theme of Jen Stout’s book, Night Train to Odesa, the story of a freelance reporter making her own way across a war-torn country. In conversation with Louise Troup, she will take the audience from a Moscow winter to the Danube Delta, from Kyiv to Odesa, Kharkiv and Kramatorsk. The action will be centred on birthday parties and in bunkers, aboard night trains and dug into frontline positions, in the company of ordinary, heroic Ukrainians trying to live under relentless attack.

Since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in 2022, Jen Stout has documented the war; in Russia, on Romanian border crossings, and all across Ukraine. Known for her vivid dispatches in print and for BBC radio. Jen is the winner of the Saltire Society’s First Book award and the Highland Book Prize.

The dangerous and long journey of a young animal is the theme of Adam Weymouth’s Lone Wolf. In 2011, a young wolf named Slavc set out from Slovenia. Tracked by GPS, he travelled a thousand miles to the Italian Alps where no wolves had lived for a century. North of Verona, he crossed paths with a female wolf on a walkabout of her own. A decade later, there are more than a hundred wolves back in the area, the result of their remarkable meeting.

In the festival’s opening event, Adam Weymouth – winner of the 2018 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award – retraces Slavc’s path, examining the changes facing these wild mountains where rewilding meets the urge to preserve culture, while climate change radically impacts traditional lives. The result is a multifaceted account of Europe’s hinterlands at a moment of political and environmental change.

Other speakers at the festival are Margaret Busby, Sara Wheeler, Lonely Planet’s Tony Wheeler, Jonathan Drori, Mark Ashley-Miller, Ash Bhardwaj, Sophie Ibbotson, Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson, plus the winner of the first Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing.

Pictured: Peter Frankopan, Adam Weymouth and Jen Stout.