Award-winning travel writer and journalist Ben Aitken will be talking about his new book, Shitty Breaks: A Celebration of Unsung Cities, that highlights the UK’s unsung and quietly brilliant places, Dunfermline and Sunderland among them.

Over the course of a year, the author of A Chip Shop in Poznan, The Gran Tour and The Marmalade Diaries visited twelve of the UK and Ireland’s least popular spots – not to take the mickey or stick the boot in, but to seek out the good stuff, and to ultimately show that anywhere – like anyone – can interesting and enjoyable if given half the chance. To hear more about Ben’s love letter to the wrong direction, join us for what promises to be a funny and illuminating evening.

Ben Aitken was born under Thatcher, grew to 6ft then stopped, and is an Aquarius. He was conceived by a nurse and a shipwright, grew up in Portsmouth, was in a boyband for a spell in the noughties, then worked as a carer throughout his twenties, all the while scribbling on the side. He is the author of six books: Dear Bill Bryson: Footnotes from a Small Island, wherein he followed Bill Bryson around the country for no good reason; A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland (a Times bestseller), wherein he worked in a fish and chip shop and travelled the country on a shoestring; The Gran Tour: Travels with my Elders (‘Both moving and hilarious’, Spectator), which involved six budget coach holidays with people much his senior and is a celebration of intergenerational relations; The Marmalade Diaries: The True Story of an Odd Couple (a Daily Mail Book of the Week), which involved moving in with an 85-year-old widow on the eve of a national lockdown; Here Comes The Fun, which investigates the serious business of having a laugh; and Shitty Breaks: A Celebration of Unsung Cities, which champions overlooked metropoles and argues that anywhere – like anyone – can be interesting and enjoyable if approached in the right fashion. He writes for The Guardian and The Times, was the TCG Travel Journalist of the Year in 2024, and is an occasional lecturer at the University of Portsmouth.