Bella Hardy

Acclaimed singer Bella Hardy, three times nominated in the BBC Folk Awards, has a voice marked as '...mesmerising' and '...faultless'.

Having spent ten years playing some of folk's biggest stages with festival regulars The Pack and Ola, she launched her debut solo album Night Visiting in Autumn 2007 to overwhelming critical support.

Bella has now established herself as one of the finest young folk acts around, singing unaccompanied ballads, or entwining her hypnotic voice with her own fiddle accompaniment to breathtaking effect. Bella is from Edale in Derbyshire's Dark Peak.

Bella’s second solo album ‘In the Shadow of Mountains’ was released in August 2009. It follows Bella’s debut Night Visiting which was released in 2007 to great critical acclaim, with Colin Irwin of fRoots writing "...Bella Hardy is more than a new generation folk revivalist... Her potential is massive. Meanwhile this is an exciting, accomplished debut", and Mike Tems of Taplas writing “…her debut album is a piece of wondrous beauty and inventive incisiveness". She was nominated for Best Original Song (Three Black Feathers) and the Horizon Award in the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2008, and again for the Horizon Award in the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2009.

She performed in two concerts at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the first ever Folk Prom in July 2008, being honoured with the privilege of opening the event with a set of unaccompanied traditional songs. The programme was broadcast simultaneously by BBC 4 and Radio 3, and she also appeared on television on Christmas Day the same year, singing the Coventry Carol in Howard Goodalls ‘The Truth about Carols’ on BBC2.