FOOD in children’s literature will be the subject of a public lecture taking place at The Hive in Worcester next week.

Professor Jean Webb will deliver the latest in the Professorial Lecture Series on Wednesday, December 3 with a talk titled ‘Devouring Books: food and fiction for children’.

Professor Webb, director of the International Forum for Research in Children's Literature at the University of Worcester, said: “Food is an essential component for life.

"Writing for children is more complex than would be thought at first.

"Writers variously use the subject of food as a means of writing about culture, national identity, history, health and morality as in, for example, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, and Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Seeing Stone.

“The lecture will cover a range of children’s literature from international perspectives where food is a means of communicating other ideas.

"It will be of interest to the literary foodie.”

Entry to the lecture is free of charge.

The monthly lectures have been running at The Hive since February, with a break for the summer, and have so far covered topics as varied as the history of local theatre, the ongoing story of DNA and whether or not it is possible to live well with dementia.