Three New Voices at Realisation Festival

Thinkers, Seekers, and Activists Joining Us This Year

The Realisation Festival is not just a sharing of ideas—it’s about inviting different ways of knowing into relationship; the intellect in dialogue with the imaginal; analysis informed by the felt sense; the urgency of world need in communion with the quiet work of inner transformation.

The organisers of the festival have never wanted to follow the script of paying for big-name speakers who might help sell tickets, but simply show up, deliver and disappear. While there is leadership and there are definitely highlights, we try to keep the event as flat and participative as possible and ask our speakers to stay for as long as possible, which usually means the whole event.

That said, the speakers at the Festival do play an important role in shaping our collective inquiry. The keynote sessions offer provocation, story, and insight to help orient us to the questions of our times, but also of our time together, acting as sparks that set ideas and feelings in motion that continue in conversations that unfold over meals, convivial late-night discussions, and in quiet moments of reflection. The Festival creates a rare kind of space—one where ideas are not just heard but metabolised, tested, and expanded upon through different kinds of inquiry and experience throughout the festival.

This year, we are grateful to be joined by at least four extraordinary speakers whose work challenges, unsettles, and invites new ways of seeing, knowing and acting, or in the lingo of the festival, of getting real, becoming real and making real. We have already mentioned Storyteller Martin Shaw and we’re now pleased to announce the following will be joining us:

Vanessa Andreotti

Professor Vanessa Andreotti is a Brazilian educator, author, philosopher, and activist, as well as Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. For decades, she has been at the forefront of rethinking education, questioning the dominant assumptions that shape our understanding of progress, knowledge, and change.

Deeply influenced by the wisdom of Indigenous traditions, Vanessa urges us to see clearly the fractures within modernity and to wake up to the deep truths of interconnection and entanglement. She invites us to meet this time of endings with wisdom, discernment, and compassion.

Of Guarani and German ancestry, Vanessa moves fluidly between worlds—trained in the Western academic tradition while also learning from Brazilian Indigenous communities. This unique perspective allows her to integrate multiple ways of knowing, offering rare clarity in a time of uncertainty and planetary transition. At this year’s festival, she will share her most recent work exploring our relationship with artificial intelligence and what it means for the future of humanity and our planet.

Sarah Wilson

Sarah Wilson is a bestselling author, journalist, podcaster, and philanthropist and founder of Australia’s largest health and wellness community, I Quit Sugar. As an advocate for a more intentional way of being, Sarah has spent years reckoning with what it means to live well, and has shared her personal explorations with honesty and vulnerability — on giving up sugar, on reshaping her relationship with anxiety, and living fully this This One Wild and Precious Life.

Her work is both pragmatic and searching, driven by a deep curiosity about how we might break free from the patterns that diminish our humanity and inhibit our individual and planetary flourishing. Her current work focuses on the unfolding collapse of social, political, economic, and ecological systems—and how we might find both personal and communal responses. She is currently exploring these themes in real time through her writing on Substack, where she is serializing her next book on how to live meaningfully — and beautifully — in the era of the metacrisis.

Roc Sandford

Finally, Roc Sandford is a writer, artist, and activist, as well as a founding member of Extinction Rebellion and a member of the artists’ collective Ocean Rebellion. Living on the remote island of Gometra in the Hebrides, Roc has embraced an off-grid, low-impact existence deeply attuned to the natural world.

In the recent book Burnt Rain, Roc explores a personal connection to the natural world in one of the UK’s most remote landscapes, offering an unflinching reckoning with the unfolding climate crisis. Splitting time between London and Gometra, Roc continues to write, campaign, and challenge the institutions driving environmental destruction, engaging in activism that spans both direct action and policy advocacy, pushing for systemic responses to ecological collapse.

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These are just a few of the voices joining the festival this year. And as ever, the Realisation Festival is shaped by everyone who comes. It unfolds not just in the scheduled sessions but in the shared experience, the conversations that challenge and inspire, and the moments of unexpected connection.

We hope you’ll be part of it. Tickets are selling fast so please don’t delay if you are keen to join us.