The Boswell Festival Online Rover Pass gives you access to all talks being streamed at this year's Festival.

Most livestreamed events will be available to watch at any time from the live event broadcast time until the 31st May.

Two refugee’s stories – one current, one historical. A fundraising event for Ukraine.

Ayrshire writer Catherine Czerkawska’s father Julian was the son of a Polish lancer born in 1926 near Lviv in Ukraine, the former Polish city of Lwow, whose life was torn apart by war. Escaping from a labour camp after the second world war he finally made his way to the UK where he settled.

In 2022, 80 years later, Liudmila Proniakina and her 5 year old daughter Margo also fled from the war zone in Ukraine on a daring journey dodging a Russian onslaught as they cut through forests to cross the border. Her sister Olga Stewart, Ayr dressmaker, had feared never seeing Lyudmila again.

The current refugee crisis in Lviv added urgency to Catherine’s determination to try to uncover her family’s story that had been lost a generation before, shedding light on their trauma. Liudmila and her family find parallels with this story of settlement into a life many miles from the people and places of their childhood.

In conversation with Georgina Adam

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Highly respected Formula One journalist and presenter with a tough but fair interview approach, Lee McKenzie has been at the heart of motorsport for almost twenty years. Inside F1 gives her unique perspective and takes us through the highs and lows, the controversies and crashes of recent years in one of the world’s biggest sports.

Lee has shared experiences, hire cars, parties and friendships with a host of drivers from Michael Schumacher to Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel to Jenson Button. She tells the stories of the careers of seven stars of the sport using her personal contact and interviews throughout the years.

Best known for her work in Formula One for Channel 4, she also presents for the BBC on rugby, the Olympics, Wimbledon and her own personal passion, equestrianism.

In conversation with Richard Bath

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Barbara Dickson has been captivating her fans for the best part of sixty years. She will describe the joys of growing up in Fife in the fifties, of moving to Edinburgh at seventeen to find her place in the world and the struggles of trying to make a living on the Scottish folk scene.

Despite becoming Scotland’s bestselling solo artist in the seventies and eighties and having huge hits such as the best-selling ever female duet ‘I Know Him So Well‘, ‘January February’ and ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’, Barbara was not content to have just a successful singing career and she turned to acting, going on to win Best Actress in Spend, Spend, Spend.

A regular on prime-time television, including guest residency on The Two Ronnies, Barbara also took to musicals, making Willy Russell’s legendary Blood Brothers her own.

Barbara’s is a warm, fascinating story of an ordinary woman with an extraordinary voice.

In conversation with Allan Little
In association with The Cumnock Tryst

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