Simon Parkin - The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad : A True Story of Science and Sacrifice in a City under Siege
This event will also be live streamed - you have the option to watch in the venue or online.
TICKET DETAILS
Tickets are now on general sale.
The Season Ticket gives you a guaranteed seat to every event in the festival.
| Date | Sunday 10th November 2024 | |
|---|---|---|
| Time | 4:00 PM | |
| Doors Open | 3:30 PM | |
| Venue | High Street Baptist Church | |
'An astonishing story brilliantly told. With a revelation on almost every page, Parkin reveals how a small group of passionate scientists put their lives on the line to save one the world’s most important seed banks…It is as moving as it is gripping to read one of the most remarkable stories of the Second World War'
Jonathan Dimbleby, Sunday Times bestselling author of Endgame: 1944
In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad - now St Petersburg - and began the longest blockade in recorded history. By the most conservative estimates, the siege would claim the lives of three-quarters of a million people. Most died of starvation. At the centre of the embattled city stood a converted palace that housed the greatest living plant library ever amassed - the world's first seed bank, housing around a quarter of a million seeds that had been collected from every continent in the world by the seed bank’s founder, the explorer Nikolai Vavilov. The Nazis knew about the existence of the seed bank, and were so desperate to claim the seeds as their own that they dispatched a ‘seed commando’ unit whose mission was to attempt to collect the seed bank’s samples and return them to an Austrian castle for study, where a British POW and seed expert helped with the research.
ABOUT SIMON PARKIN
Simon Parkin is an award-winning British writer and journalist. He is a contributing writer for the New Yorker and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS), and is the author of A Game of Birds and Wolves and The Island of Extraordinary Captives, which was a New Yorker Book of the Year and won the Wingate Literary Prize. He lives in West Sussex.