Stephen Ellcock - Ark

Stephen Ellcock will be at Arnolfini on Wednesday 2 December, talking about his new book Ark with writer Jade Angeles Fitton. It's an evening in conversation, so rather than a formal reading, you'll hear the two of them working through the book together.

Ellcock is a world-renowned archivist, author and visual curator who's spent the last decade building what he describes as the ultimate virtual museum — a project that's picked up more than 650,000 followers worldwide. Ark is the latest result of that work, published by Thames and Hudson in October 2026 with a foreword by Robert Macfarlane. It brings together over 450 images from cultures and eras across the five kingdoms of nature, with essays by Sarah Perry, Harriet Rix, Helen Scales and Stephen Moss. The book focuses on critically endangered or vulnerable species, so it's as much a record of what's at risk as it is a collection of images.

If you're not familiar with his earlier work, Ark sits alongside a long list of titles: Elements, Underworlds, The Cosmic Dance, All Good Things, The Book of Change, England on Fire and The Book of Textiles. It's a good chance to see where this one fits into the wider project he's been building for years.

Joining him on the night is Jade Angeles Fitton, a former award-winning producer whose hybrid-memoir Hermit was published by Penguin Random House in 2023. There are no age restrictions for the evening, though under-18s need to be accompanied by an adult over 21 in a 1:1 ratio. Copies of Ark will be available to buy there, so you can pick up your own copy on the night. Tickets are £10.80, and it starts at 18:30.