Lancaster Literature Festival - Litfest Autumn Festival

Litfest – Lancaster Literature Festival – blows back into the city with an exciting line-up for its Autumn Weekend (17-21 October), plus a special event on 18 November!

We open with a ferocious, mischievous Cumbrian wind that is the subject of Sarah Hall’s major new novel, Helm, the tale of a unique life force which buffets the rugged northern landscape and the resilient souls that live there.

Then on 18 and 19 October we’ll be exploring folk tales, giants and Frankenstein, writing and performing in pairs, the dark history of cults, ‘witches’ and the legacies of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, as we are joined by writers, poets, storytellers, filmmakers and graphic novelists in a Fall feast for the mind and all the senses. Here’s who’s coming:

- Children’s author Lucy Strange with Lockett & Wilde’s new adventure and a retelling of Frankenstein

- Poets Yvonne Reddick and Liam Bates in a double bill on people, places and landscape

- Jacqueline Harris and illustrator Marjan Wouda on Lancashire Folk Tales

- Zoe Lambert with her acclaimed one-woman show, A Maternal Exorcism

- Liverpool lad Malik Al Nasir in search of his ‘Slave Roots’

- Oliver K. Langmead and MK Hardy on the art of co-writing

- Mollie Ray and Helen Bate on writing without words

- Carol Ann Lee on the Pendle Witches as a true crime story

On the 20 and 21 October we are delighted to welcome internationally renowned British-Chinese author and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo as she discusses Call Me Ishmaelle, her reimagining of Herman Melville’s 19th-century classic, with the Litfest International Online Bookclub (ALL WELCOME!), and the next day presents the 5th Lancaster International Fiction Lecture: ‘Fiction as an Act of Sabotage’.

Plus, there’s a bonus date for your diary – on 18 November at 7pm – Poet Laureate Simon Armitage joins Litfest and Lancaster Arts at the Nuffield Theatre on the Lancaster University campus for a very special event on the theme of ‘Land’, reading from and discussing his latest collections Blossomise, Dwell and New Cemetery with award-winning poet Kim Moore.

To find out more about the Litfest Autumn Festival (17-21 October, 18 November), please visit www.litfest.org or look out for copies of our printed programmes in venues and outlets around Lancaster and Morecambe.