Join two remarkable writers for a conversation in English with Randell Cottage Trustee Jean Anderson discussing where travel, nature and history meet the art of literature.
Light refreshments from 6:15pm.
2026 Randell Cottage French Writer in Residence, traveler and writer, Katia Astafieff explores the world of 19th Century botanical artists.
Katia loves popularising science, especially botany. She also has a particular interest in the great explorers and has brought these two topics together in her book L’Aventure extraordinaire des plantes voyageuses, (The Extraordinary Adventure of the Travelling Plants, Dunod, 2018), in which she tells the story of eleven plants and eleven explorers.
Her most recent book, Par les chemins des Indes: Sur les traces du botaniste français qui aurait pu devenir vice-roi du Cachemire (Along Indian Routes: In the Footsteps of the French Botanist Who Could Have Become Vice-Roy of Kashmir) traced the story of Victor Jacquemont’s botanical travels in the 1840s.
You can read an extract here, translated for us by Trustee Jean Anderson, with permission from Katia’s publishers.
After writing about male explorers, Katia says she began to be interested in the women botanists who had similarly travelled to distant lands to discover new species.
Accordingly, while based at Randell Cottage, Katia aims to take inspiration from the life of Englishwoman Marianne North, a natural history illustrator, whom Charles Darwin encouraged to travel to New Zealand in 1880. She envisages ‘a kind of fictionalised biography’ that will develop from research, paintings, observations of the living environment, meetings with people, thirst for knowledge, art and adventure. Katia says, “Marianne North’s special approach was to show plants in their natural environment, including background landscapes, which gives her work an ecological dimension, since she shows the interactions between the species and their environments. Her work lies on the border between art and science.”
Thom Conroy is the author of The Salted Air and The Naturalist (Penguin Random-House) and the editor of the personal essay collection Home (Massey University Press). The winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize, he has published short fiction widely in literary journals in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. Thom is currently a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University, where he also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal Headland.
