Tiffany Murray in conversation with Elaine Canning - Swansea

Join us as we welcome Tiffany Murray who will be talking to Elaine Canning about her brilliant memoir, My Family and Other Rock Stars.

The event will also feature a music quiz!

It's the late 1970s and Tiff lives with her mum, Joan, at Rockfield, the iconic recording studios. This place of legend, where some of the most famous rock albums of all time were recorded, is the background to a freewheeling, ever-changing whirlwind of a childhood. Tiff's days are spent running around the farm, making friends with local wildlife and helping out with the endless array of dishes her mum creates to keep the bands fed. She's looking for a dog, she's looking for a father; but the one constant throughout is her and Joan, building an unconventional family in the most unlikely of locations.
'My Family and Other Rock Stars' is Tiff's remarkable, truly unique story of growing up in a rural idyll, of Cordon Bleu cookery and of a childhood where the chances of bumping into Freddie Mercury playing piano, or a group of Hell's Angels turning up to record for Lemmy, or even the hope of David Bowie appearing, were as normal as hopscotch and homework.
‘A TESTAMENT TO THE LOVE AND CONNECTION THAT MUSIC AND FOOD CAN BRING’ - THE TIMES
About the author
Tiffany Murray’s memoir, My Family and Other Rock Stars, was published by Fleet (Little, Brown) in May 2024. It was the Sunday Times, Daily Mail and The Week ‘Book of the Week’. In the Observer ‘Book of the Day’ slot, Nick Duerden called her ‘a sublime memoirist’.
Tiffany’s first two novels, Diamond Star Halo (Granta) and Happy Accidents (4th Estate), were shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and Diamond Star Halo was a book of the year in The Guardian. Happy Accidents is the coming-of-age tale of 11-year-old Kate Happy on the Welsh-English border, and it drew comparisons with Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm (Boyd Tonkin). Diamond Star Halo tells the story of Halo Llewelyn and her unconventional family who run a recording studio in rural Wales: a story of first love and rock 'n' roll that was likened to Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle and John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire (The Guardian). David Mitchell chose Tiff’s third novel, Sugar Hall, for his list, ‘My 6 Favourite Ghost Stories’ (The Week).
Tiff has a series on BBC Radio 4, Hulda’s Café, set in Grindavík, Iceland. As well as another BBC short story, Lava! Lava! Lava!
Her non-fiction has appeared in: Granta, the Guardian, GQ, the Observer, the Telegraph, OxTravels, the Sunday Times and on BBC Radio 4. Her short fiction has been included in various anthologies, most recently in the crime collection, Cast a Long Shadow (Honno). She is a recipient of the Roger Deakin Award for nature writing from the Society of Authors, she has been an International Hay Festival Fiction fellow, an RLF fellow, a Fulbright scholar, and a Senior Lecturer. She has a PhD from UEA and an MA in Caribbean Literature from New York University. Tiff runs Hay Festival’s program for Welsh writers, ‘Writers at Work’, and she works internationally with developing writers.
*Please note: Event delivered in English