Ella Berthoud’s cultural highlights

Ella Berthoud studied English at Cambridge University where she began to dream of becoming a “Book Doctor” – someone who prescribed fiction for people’s ailments, from angst to alopecia. Having spent her formative years in the diplomatic milieu across many continents, she always felt that people needed to talk literature around every juncture in life.

Ella set up as a bibliotherapist in 2007, while pursuing her successful career as a visual artist.

She and Susan Elderkin wrote The Novel Cure (2015) and now works at The School of Life in Bloomsbury where she gives one to one consultations in bibliotherapy.

Exhibition: Hurvin Anderson at Tate Britain

The first Hurvin Anderson painting I saw was at Soulscapes, an exhibition of landscape art at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Among all the extraordinary artists on display, his work stopped me in my tracks. The dripping paint, dense vegetation and fleeting traces of human presence captured something I recognised immediately from my years living in Trinidad. His paintings don’t simply depict landscape – they evoke memory. As a painter myself, I’m fascinated by the way another artist can permanently alter your own way of seeing. Shortly afterwards I returned to Trinidad and found myself seeing the rainforest through Anderson’s eyes. Even Maracas Beach, where I spent so much time as a teenager, seemed transformed: still lush and beautiful, but now tinged with a loneliness I had never noticed before. Great art doesn’t just show you the world; it changes the way you see it.

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/hurvin-anderson

Book: Ibis (2025) by Justin Haynes

In April, I went to the Bocas literary festival in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and met authors, poets and luminaries of the Caribbean literary world. One of these is Justin Haynes, who has just published his first novel, Ibis. This is a time travelling, magical book that tackles contemporary issues – migration, sex-trafficking and poverty – head on. It’s told from multiple viewpoints, and leaps back and forth in time, from the present to the time when the fishing village of New Felicity was a sugar plantation with slaves. In the present day, a lone ibis comes to New Felicity, where an eleven-year-old Venezuelan refugee named Milagros is being hunted by the authorities. Bad luck has plagued the village since a local witch was murdered. Milagros’s story runs through the book as she searches for her lost mother. The inherited trauma passed down through the people of the village expresses itself through the symbols and portents sent by nature – the single ibis, a lone flying fish and a great wind. This is a richly satisfying novel with a great depth of colour, magic and a plethora of brilliant stories.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/ibis/justin-haynes/9781419772771

Film: The Odyssey (2026) directed by Christopher Nolan

I’ve been fascinated by The Odyssey for as long as I can remember. My father, who studied Classics, filled our childhood with Greek myths, while my mother was a born storyteller who made those ancient tales feel alive. Since then, I’ve returned to Homer again and again, and more recently loved Natalie Haynes’s novel A Thousand Ships, which reimagines the story through the women left behind. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation has an extraordinary cast, but what excites me most is that it was filmed partly on Ithaca. I take artists there to paint every year, and the island still feels saturated with myth. Some places refuse to separate history from imagination.

https://www.odysseymovie.com/

Music: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Nick Cave has accompanied different stages of my life for decades. His songs are full of darkness, tenderness and unexpected flashes of hope, but it is his writing about grief that has stayed with me most. As someone whose paintings often begin with listening rather than looking, I find his music creates landscapes as vividly as any image. Few artists have transformed personal tragedy into work that feels so generous to others. Every time I see him perform, I’m reminded that art doesn’t erase hurt, but it helps us to live alongside it.

https://nickcavebrighton.com/

Event: Love Supreme Jazz Festival

Love Supreme has become one of those festivals where discovery matters as much as nostalgia. I go for the music, but I stay for the atmosphere: families, serious jazz lovers, curious newcomers and world-class musicians all sharing the same fields beneath the South Downs. Jazz rewards listening in a different way from almost any other music. It asks you to pay attention to improvisation, conversation and surprise. This year I went with my three daughters, and we all wandered around being captivated by unexpected bursts of musical pleasure – from Sister Sledge to Loyle Carner, De La Soul and Esperanza Spalding. It was music in a heatwave; we camped, loving every minute, apart from that moment when I discovered a tick had burrowed into my skin, and I had to dash to the A&E tent to have it removed, all to the soundtrack of Samara Joy.

https://lovesupremefestival.com/

Favourite WritersMosaic writer: Guy Gunaratne

Guy Gunaratne is one of those writers whose prose seems to have its own soundtrack. I was completely absorbed by his novel In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), and Mister, Mister (2023) confirmed for me that he is one of the most original voices writing today. What I love most is the musicality of his language. He writes in rhythms as much as sentences, and you hear his characters before you see them. That resonates with me because so much of my own creative life begins with listening as well as looking. Sound has always been my way into landscape and memory, and Guy’s writing reminds me that language is music itself. Every piece he writes for WritersMosaic – and indeed anywhere – has that rare quality of making me slow down and listen more carefully.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/in-our-mad-and-furious-city/guy-gunaratne/9781472250216

Ella Berthoud

Ella Berthoud is a bibliotherapist, visual artist and novelist.