Litfest 2026
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Litfest
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
Litfest returns to Lancaster with a programme focused on the rights of the natural world. Across 10 days of readings, talks and participatory projects, the festival explores what it might mean to recognise rivers, animals and ecosystems as having rights – and why that idea feels increasingly urgent.
That focus runs right through the festival, shaping the Big Read choice, M.G. Leonard’s eco-thriller Twitch, alongside reading schemes designed to draw in families, book groups and solo readers alike. It also underpins Litfest’s most public-facing projects, from a digital poetry map built from open submissions to Messages from the Wild, collecting short written and recorded reflections from people young and old.
The literary programme brings together established and emerging voices across fiction, poetry, memoir and history, including novelists Alan Hollinghurst and Kit de Waal, poets Fiona Benson and Sarah Howe, and memoirist Blake Morrison, alongside rising North West writers and academics including Dan Hicks and Anna Whitelock.
Founded in 1978 and run by a volunteer board, Litfest is one of the UK’s longest-running literature festivals, rooted in Lancaster and extended through year-round projects beyond the spring programme. Workshops, children’s events, film screenings and a performance of The War of the Worlds by imitating the dog contribute to one of the festival’s most wide-ranging editions yet.
The festival closes with a panel on the rights of nature itself, bringing writers, environmental thinkers and legal voices together to test how the idea holds up in practice.
Events take place at The Storey and at other Lancaster venues: www.litfest.org
