Piers Brendon – ‘Sea Scenes around the Delectable Duchy’

This talk explores the vital part played by the sea in the literary and imaginative life of Cornwall. It focuses on two of the county’s most celebrated writers, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who was intoxicated by the “magic of the sea”, and Robert Stephen Hawker, who found in the “ever-striking scene of the Sea … a storehouse of incident and imagery”. The Delectable Duchy is a peninsula at the extremity of an island and, as Piers Brendon shows, its people have always been surrounded, figuratively as well as literally, by brine. 

Dr Piers Brendon was born in Poughill and spent his early childhood in Bude. He is the author of sixteen books, including Hawker of Morwenstow (1975), and he has edited a selection of Hawker’s Cornish Ballads & Other Poems. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.