The Gibraltar Gibunco Literary Festival has added four more events to its program, which correspond to top-level scientific authors, such as the Gibraltarian Finlayson. They will join the programming that the Gibraltarian authorities have been gradually announcing in recent weeks.
Looking ahead to the Festival, which will be held in November, the Minister of Tourism and Culture, Christian Santos, has indicated: “This impressive group of international and local authors demonstrates the depth and diversity of the Festival program. From international relations to historical novels and local heritage, there is something for all interests and tastes,” he stressed.
Sir Liam Fox
One of the new guests is Sir Liam Fox (pictured above), a doctor at the University of Glasgow. He was MP for North Somerset from 1992 to 2024. In addition, he was Secretary of State for Defense between 2010 and 2011 and first Secretary of State for International Trade and, between 2016 and 2019, President of the Board of Trade.
In 2013, he published Rising Tidesa book that analyzes the challenges of the era of globalization.
He was the United Kingdom’s candidate to serve as Director-General of the World Trade Organization in 2020. In 2021, he was invited by the ambassadors of the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Bahrain and Morocco to create and chair the British organization UK Abraham Accords. Group to promote and support the international peace agreement.
In 2024, he published his second book, The Coming Storm: how water will write the 21st century in which he examines his crucial role in security, climate and human health from his varied professional experiences.
Keir Giles
Also joining the program is Keir Giles, who has dedicated his career to observing, studying and explaining Russia. Giles is a regular contributor and commentator on Russian affairs for international print and broadcast media and has also published in-depth analysis in academic and military publications across Europe and North America.
He is a Senior Consulting Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, and has also worked with more than a dozen governments and armed forces around the world on threat prediction and analysis. Russian.
After one of the shortest careers on record in the Royal Air Force (RAF) and having traveled extensively in the Soviet Union while earning a degree in Russian, Keir Giles co-founded the first company offering Western pilots the opportunity to fly Soviet military aircraft, in locations near Moscow and in the Crimea.
He later worked with the BBC Monitoring Service (BBCM) in the UK and Russia, continued to specialize in the Russian military and moved to the UK Defense Academy to work on Russian strategy and doctrine, information and cyber warfare and monitoring the development of Russia’s war plans.
Giles is the author of multiple publications explaining the Russian approach to the war, including Handbook of Russian Information Warfare of NATO (2016), and Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Brookings, 2019), which delves into the persistent factors that cause relations with Russia to enter into crisis.
your book Russia’s War on Everybody (Russia’s war against everyone) (Bloomsbury, 2022) describes the human impact of Russian campaigns to achieve power and influence around the world, far beyond Ukraine.
Paterson Joseph
For his part, the actor Paterson Joseph also appears in its program, who has performed on numerous British stages, large and small, from the Bush Theater to the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford and the National Theater in London, passing through the Royal Exchange in Manchester . He has been working in television since the late 1980s on programs in the United Kingdom and the United States.
The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho (The secret diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho) It is his first novel. During his presentation, Patterson will talk about why he wrote this book and about his childhood in Britain as a black child. He will contrast and compare that life with that of Sancho, 250 years before the author was born. The event will include the reading of some passages from the novel and a question and answer session from the public.
Geraldine, Stuart y Clive Finlayson
Clive, Geraldine y Stuart Finlayson
All three members of the Finlayson family have published articles in leading international journals and are authors of various books both locally and internationally.
In the 2024 edition of the Literary Festival they will talk about two books. One of them is a recent publication on the extinction of Neanderthals, published by the prestigious Spanish publishing house Salvat.
The other, recently released, is titled Gibraltar: geography, nature, history, heritage (Gibraltar: geography, nature, history, heritage), which will be presented at the Literary Festival. In it, the Finlaysons outline decades of research and offer an overview of Gibraltar’s rich history and how geography and nature have shaped it. They also describe the heritage that survives from this incredibly rich and varied past. The work is illustrated with own photographs and archive images of Gibraltar in the past. It promises to be a unique and personal view of Gibraltar, written by those who have investigated it first-hand. It will be a must-read reference book for anyone interested in Gibraltar and its past.
Professor Clive Finlayson has a PhD from the University of Oxford. He is Beacon Professor at the University of Gibraltar, visiting professor at Liverpool John Moores University. Previously he was an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. He is an elected member of the European Academy. Clive’s interests are wide-ranging, but he says the study of birds has always been at the top of his list. He is known internationally for his work on Neanderthals.
Professor Geraldine Finlayson has a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University and is an Associate Professor at Liverpool John Moores University. His main line of research has been the reconstruction of Gibraltar’s past environment. Her interests are varied and include understanding the historical development of cuisine in Gibraltar, the nuances of Gibraltar speech and underwater archaeology, of which she is an instructor.
Dr Stewart Finlayson, son of Geraldine and Clive, also has a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University. His passion for birds, something of a family tradition, led him to study the way Neanderthals took advantage of birds. He came to discover in detail how they took advantage of a wide range of species, not only for food, but also for their feathers and claws. The implications of this work were far-reaching, as it had enormous implications for our understanding of the cognitive abilities of Neanderthals.
Stewart follows the family trait of diversity of interests. A bat specialist, he dedicates much of his research time to understanding the ecology and movements of Gibraltar’s bats. His research takes him to caves and other bat roosts in much of the south of the Iberian Peninsula.
