Poet Laureate to appear at autumn festival by Lancaster Litfest team

The team behind Lancaster's oldest festival will return with a weekend of literary events this autumn.

Litfest – Lancaster Literature Festival – blows back into the city with its Autumn Weekend (October 17-21), plus a special event on November 18 with Poet Laureate Simon Armitage.

The 46th annual Litfest took place earlier this year.

The Autumn Weekend begins at the Storey Centre on October 17 with a look at 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 October 18 and 19 there will be 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 writers, poets, storytellers, film-makers and graphic novelists take part in the weekend.

They will include:

• 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 October 20 and 21, internationally renowned British-Chinese author and film-maker Xiaolu Guo will discuss 'Call Me Ishmaelle', her reimagining of Herman Melville’s 19th-century classic, with the Litfest International Online Bookclub.

And on October 22, there will be the 5th Lancaster International Fiction Lecture: ‘Fiction as an Act of Sabotage’.

In a bonus date, November 18 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.

The full programme is available HERE.