Simon Yates of Touching the Void - Pleasure and Pain

Simon Yates is coming to the Joseph Rowntree Theatre on Sunday 13 December, with his talk Pleasure and Pain starting at 7:30pm. If the name doesn't ring a bell, the story almost certainly will. Yates became a household name after a climbing disaster on the remote Siula Grande in Peru back in 1985, where he had to cut the rope to save himself and his injured partner, Joe Simpson. That ordeal became the book Touching the Void, which later went to film and then to the stage.

More than 35 years on, he's still an active exploratory climber and guide. He leads several expeditions every year, taking teams to ranges from the Arctic and Antarctic to Alaska and Central Asia, and has more than 80 trips to some of the world's highest and most remote mountains under his belt. Pleasure and Pain is billed as a fast-moving, first-hand account of adventure, endurance and survival, and it's a talk that draws on that whole stretch of a climbing life, not just the one famous incident.

He's known for speaking with wit and a dry sense of humour, and the talk is lavishly illustrated with images and film from his climbs, so you'll see the places he's talking about rather than just hearing about them. Tickets are £18 to £20, and it runs at 7:30pm on Sunday 13 December at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre in York.