Fiesta: A Journey Through Human Festivity with Daniel Stables

Join us in our beautiful State Apartments for a fascinating talk with travel writer Daniel Stables. An awardwinning journalist for National Geographic and the BBC, Daniel explores global festivity through the journeys captured in his acclaimed book Fiesta. Discover how festivals around the world reveal what it means to celebrate, connect, and be human.

About the event

Fiesta is a travel book which explores human festivity through a series of travel narratives set at some of the world’s most remarkable festivals. This talk, like the book, takes the audience on a journey through festivity, with a series of travel narratives exploring what festivals teach us about human culture and behaviour in societies across the globe.

The talk explores the vibrant tapestry of human festivity, delving into the extraordinary lengths to which we go to express our cultures and commemorate life’s milestones. From the masked soirées of Venice Carnival to the whirling dervishes of Konya, from animist funerals in Sulawesi to the depraved pilgrimage that is the Romería de El Rocío, festivals are the birds-of-paradise of human cultural expression: luminescent, effervescent, eye-catching and strange.

Beyond being outwardly captivating, though, something deeper is going on at festivals. They lift us out of daily life and onto a level, liminal plain, erasing the normal hierarchies of life and turning its structures upside down  and in their carnivalesque chaos, festivals reveal something raw and unaffected in us, taking us out of our own heads and away from our egoistic concerns and allowing us to connect to something greater than ourselves, be that our culture, community, or something divine. The talk showcases how festivals not only display human culture at its most vivid and varied, but also reveal the motivations and similarities which we all share in human cultures across the world.

Additional information

Enter via London Gate

This event is eligible for our 20% ticket bundle discount.

Book tickets to three or more different events across the festival and you can save 20%. Tickets must be purchased in the same transaction and the discount will automatically be applied within the basket.

About the speaker

Daniel Stables has been working as a travel writer for the last decade, first writing guidebooks for Rough Guides, and later writing articles for National Geographic, the BBC, and national newspapers. He has won acclaim and recognition for his work, having received several nominations for Travel Writer of the Year. More of his work can be found at his website, danielstables.co.uk. His debut non-fiction book, Fiesta: A Journey Through Festivity, was published by Icon Books in August 2025 (paperback published in July 2026).