Thousand Feasts

NIGEL SLATER is an award-winning author, journalist and television presenter. He has been the food columnist for the Observer for over thirty years. His bestselling titles include the cookbook classics Appetite, The Kitchen Diaries and The Christmas Chronicles. His latest non-fiction book is A Thousand Feasts. He has made cookery programmes and documentaries for BBC1, BBC2 and BBC4. His memoir Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger won six major awards and became a film and stage production. His writing has won the James Beard Award, the National Book Award, the Glenfiddich Trophy, the André Simon Memorial Prize, the British Biography of the Year and the Fortnum & Mason Best Food Book. In 2020, he was awarded an OBE for services to cookery and literature. He lives in London.

PRAISE FOR A THOUSAND FEASTS: ‘Slater is at his best on food and travel: his ability to evoke a culture and a mood (and his food writing by itself does both) is remarkable … He is a purveyor of the good life, simplicity, cosiness and warmth’Sunday Times‘Slater’s greatest talent is making the ordinary extraordinary, showing us how to revel in a ripe fig or a piece of cheese … He may worry that he sounds trite and that his musings on diminutive pleasures are trivial, that he hasn’t answered any of the big questions about the universe, but as I leave I feel grateful for Slater, the god of small things’ The Times‘I loved this. It is a secular book of hours – thoughts and pleasures beautifully cadenced and generously placed’ Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes‘Nigel Slater has a magical capacity to find beauty in the smallest moments. A nourishing, sustaining book’ Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time‘Nigel Slater’s prose is the rarest delicacy of all: exquisite yet effortless, filled with heart, tenderness, yearning and humour. I feel so lucky to exist in a time when Slater is writing about what it is to be alive' Elizabeth Day, author of Friendaholic‘The granular detail and the passion are obviously signature Slater, but this book feels different: a sort of timeless diary, with its glimpsed, generous offerings to the tired reader, who in days like ours might forget that there’s still so much beauty to be had’ Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist‘Toast brandished food as a weapon. Feasts provides a panacea, allowing the author the boyhood moments he was denied, whether sneaking bites of biscuit batter or fretting in Tokyo under the stern, schoolmistress glare of a “disapproving eel lady” … ephemeral and enriched by pathos’ Irish Times