What happens when a comedian who cooks hotel-room feasts meets a barbecue and live fire expert who traces the history of a nation through its food? You get one of the most delicious - and unexpected - conversations of the festival.
 
George Egg has built a following as the irrepressible Snack Hacker: part passionate home cook, part recipe inventor, part stand-up comedian. His debut cookbook proves that great food doesn't need a professional kitchen - just curiosity, ingenuity, and a willingness to challenge food snobbery. In 2024 he won Content Creator of the Year at the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards.
 
Melissa Thompson is an award-winning food writer and regular panellist on Radio 4's The Kitchen Cabinet, whose new book Fired Up brings bold, modern barbecue cooking to everyone. Her debut, Motherland, was a landmark celebration of Jamaican cuisine, weaving over 500 years of history into its recipes and was named Book of the Year’ by BBC Radio 4 Food Programme. 
 
Together, they'll be cooking live, talking food, and taking your questions - with host Nicola Miller keeping the heat just right.
 
Come hungry.
 
Format: Demonstration & Chat
Themes: Non-Fiction, Adults, Young People, Food
 
George Egg Books: The Snack Hacker
George Egg is wonderfully difficult to categorise. He straddles the gaps between passionate home cook, recipe inventor, food writer, performer, podcaster and comedian, a combination that led to his winning Content Creator of the Year at the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards. He is a frequent guest on BBC’s 6Music on the Craig Charles Show, has appeared on Sunday Brunch and Saturday Kitchen and is a regular at festivals and events across the UK. 
 
The Snack Hacker, his first cookbook and a Sunday Times bestseller, has been praised by comedian James Acaster as “the cookbook I’ve been waiting for my entire life”, while Joe Lycett called it “beautifully designed, super accessible, honest, funny and completely irresistible”. Gurdeep Loyal praised George’s “WOW-inducing recipes, ingenious gourmet hacks and flavour fireworks”, while Nigella Lawson described The Snack Hacker approach as being “about maximising flavour, banishing blandness and eliminating the closely guarded boundary between high and low taste.”
 
Melissa Thompson Books: Motherland, Fired Up
Melissa Thompson is a live-fire cook, author and broadcaster.
 
An ambassador for BBQ brand Weber, Melissa showcases a wide-range of recipes and possibilities for cooking over fire. She is the author of two cookbooks. Fired Up celebrates barbecue with modern recipes and tips on the BBQ basics for beginners.
 
Her debut cookbook, Motherland, charts the island’s history through food with accompanying recipes. Of Maltese and Jamaican descent and based in London, her heritage features heavily in her food. She has demonstrated the art of jerk and barbecue cooking to audiences across the UK and Europe, and is a regular chef at Meatopia, as well as other festivals and live fire events. She is a panellist on Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, and writes for Good Food magazine, The Guardian, Conde Nast Traveller, National Geographic and more. @melissafood
 
Nic Miller
Nicola is a Bury St Edmunds–based food, travel and culture writer and broadcaster. She won the Guild of Food Writers Best Online Writer award in 2020 for her newsletter Tales From Topographic Kitchens, and was named Fortnum & Mason Cookery Writer of the Year in 2022 for her monthly print and digital column in Suffolk News. Nicola writes for publications including OFM, The Guardian, and Waitrose Food, co-hosts a lunchtime show on Suffolk Sound radio and regularly chairs live events. In 2025, she chaired her first event for the Bury Literature Festival, interviewing Olia Hercules and Felicity Spector, and she previously served on the committee for the festival’s inaugural year in 2017.