Litfest 2025 at various venues and online

One of the oldest literature festivals in the country, Lancaster Literature Festival, or Litfest to its friends, is rolling out its 46th programme, having created a variety of events for its audiences since 1978.

For 2025, the main festival runs 7 to 17 March, with this annual celebration of literature taking the theme The World into Words, exploring how our heritage and our environment can be brought into focus through powerful words and stories. This year’s digital poetry project, encouraging poets of all ages to submit work, takes The World into Words as its theme, and will be curated by the festival’s Poet in Residence, Malika Booker, culminating in a gala poetry reading (15 March, 6pm).

Earlier (15 March, 3pm), Malika Booker – a British spoken word poet of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage, and a lecturer in creative writing at Man Met’s Manchester Writing School and twice winner, in 2017 and 2023, of the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – will be reading from her first collection, Pepper Seed, a celebration of Caribbean culture which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. She will also present some of her new works.

The festival’s poetry strand is particularly strong this year. Paul Farley and Jake Hawkey present a Poetry Double Bill on 13 March: Paul Farley (author of six collections of poetry with Picador) celebrating his faith in the music and shape of language; Jake Hawkey looking at the difficult relationships between close family members in his first collection But & Though.

The three winning poets of the Litfest/Wayleave Press poetry pamphlet competition read on 15 March at 1pm, followed, at 4.30pm, by the judges Ian Duhig and Jane Routh, who will present their new collections, An Arbitrary Lightbulb (Picador, 2024) and The Luck (Smith|Doorstop, 2024) , respectively. Ian Duhig is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has won the Forward Best Poem Prize once, the National Poetry Competition twice and been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize four times. Jane Routh won the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize.

Litfest hosts other residencies, including Naturalist in Residence in the shape of environmental campaigner, kayaker and Winner of the 2023 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing Amy-Jane Beer (hear from her on 7 March) and Philosopher in Residence Julian Baggini, who will be discussing food culture and nutritional science in the context of ecological crises (16 March).

Reader in Residence Katherine Woodfine will be joined on the free three-day Children’s Festival bill by Blackpool’s “poet of the north” Nathan Parker, author Phil Earle (supporting the fifth annual Big Read challenge with more than 500 free books for kids) and Natasha Devon, author of Toxic and prequel Babushka.

There’s a strong history thread, too, and coinciding with International Women’s Day on 8 March, Litfest has commissioned a talk by Eleanor Levin about the incredible ‘Historical Women of Lancaster’, tracking the lives of these remarkable women through Lancaster landmarks.

And following the main festival, Litfest is hosting additional events including: a special Litfest edition of The Wordarium, featuring performance poet Dominic Berry; acclaimed Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh, in a joint event with Lancaster Arts (2 April); AC Grayling discussing his latest book, Discriminations: Making Peace in the Culture Wars (3 April), and environmental campaigner Bella Lack presenting the “important and illuminating” 2025 Lancaster Environment Lecture, in collaboration with Lancaster University (15 May).