Last updated 15:59, Wednesday, 05 March 2008

JOURNALIST John Simpson has been sent to Iraq and so will miss Keswick Words by the Water literature festival.

But all is not lost as Kate Adie has stepped into the breach.

She will appear instead on Sunday, March 9, at 11.30am.

As the old joke went – British soldiers knew they were in trouble when Kate Adie arrived on the scene. She has reported memorably and courageously from the world's worst trouble spots, including Tiananmen Square, the Gulf and Northern Ireland. She first came to prominence for her coverage of the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege.

She became the BBC's chief news correspondent in 1989 and has since won an impressive array of awards including an OBE in 1993.

Self-styled as the 'aging old trout', Kate has recently published her memoirs of life on the front line in which she discusses her close encounters with bullets, the mayhem of desert warfare and the eccentricities of royal tours.

At the festival, she will talk about her work for the BBC and more recently, her life as a writer.

The festival runs from March 9.