Lancaster’s annual Litfest, supported by Lancaster University, returns from 13 to 22 March with its focus squarely on the natural world.

And University academics will a play key part in the festival which this year, explores the idea of ‘The Rights of Nature’.

The event will focus on voices and ideas that reveal why recognising the rights of rivers, birds, animals, fish and insects is more important now than ever.

This year’s poetry call-out for the Litfest digital poetry map invites poets to submit up to three poems on the theme of ‘the rights of nature’, while podcaster Annabel Ross invites young and old to send in their own 100-word written or recorded ‘Messages from the Wild’.

In the National Year of Reading, the Litfest focus is on pleasure and nature, with M.G. Leonard’s eco-thriller Twitch selected as this year’s Big Read book. Several hundred copies of Twitch will be offered free to Lancaster and Morecambe secondary schools.

There are three new Big Read schemes to suit different preferences: Book Groups, ‘Reading Buddies’ – where youngsters and family or friends can team up to read the book together – and, of course, ‘flying solo’. And there are prizes to be won!

Litfest 2026 also includes:

• History - this year’s Lancaster History Lecture, now in its third year and part of Litfest, will be delivered on Wednesday 18 March by Professor Dan Hicks, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, in conversation with Lancaster University’s Professor Deborah Sutton. Professor Hicks will draw on his controversial book, Every Monument Will Fall, offering an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and suggesting how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of a violent past. This event is free and will also be streamed online via Crowdcast – tickets available via the Litfest website.
• Fiction from nationally recognised novelists Alan Hollinghurst and Kit de Waal, through rising stars Joanna Kavenna and Lancaster University lecturer Dr Eoghan Walls, to new north-west fiction writers, including Nick Fragel, Lisa Nicholas, John Whitehead and Hank Williams
• Poetry from Fiona Benson, Sarah Howe, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Polly Atkin
• Memoir from the master of memoir, Blake Morrison

The line-up also includes Lancaster University Professor Andrew Quick’s imitating the dog’s The War of the Worlds show at The Dukes, writers’ workshops, children’s activities, 5 Writers in residence’, and 2 showings of Darren Andrews’ acclaimed film Starling: Iridescent Black, Litfest 2026.

The festival ends with a panel on ‘the Rights of Nature’ chaired by Lancaster University Writer In Residence Karen Lloyd, with the Eden Project’s Juliet Rose, environmental lawyer Anna Tranter and authors Lee Schofield and Anna Levin.

Litfest 2026 also sees the Polari Literary Salon make its Lancaster debut .

On 14 March, the multi-award-winning Polari Literary Salon, founded by author Paul Burston and hailed as ‘London’s most theatrical salon’ ( New York Times), will make its Lancaster debut as part of Litfest 2026.

Hosted by Paul Burston, the Salon’s guest writers will include author and poet Rosie Garland, novelist VG Lee and award-winning poet Max Wallis, founder of The Aftershock Review.

One of Litfest's successes in the past few years has been its collaboration with the LGBTQ+ community.

Guided by Litfest trustee Gurmit Singh, in partnership with Lancaster-based queer arts group Kalamos Creative, 2026 sees a quantum leap on this front, with the festival’s first ‘LGBTQ+ Writer in Residence’ and several other events including:

• A seminar with Creative Writing Students at Lancaster University on 13 March, moderated by Lancaster University Creative Writing tutor Dr Oliver K. Langmead
• A discussion of life-writing – ‘Queering the Memoir’ – on 14 March in The Olive Bar at The Gregson Community and Arts Centre at 2pm between Paul Burston and local author and film-maker Gordon Urquhart about their two very different and controversial memoirs We Can Be Heroes and The Pope’s Armada
• The Polari Literary Salon at Atkinson's Hall Cafe, at 7pm on 14 March
• A major series of writing workshops – the Queer Life Writing Course* – will start with an in-person session facilitated by Paul Burston and Gordon Urquhart at Moor Space, the Dukes, on Saturday 14 March at 11am.

*Applications for the Litfest Queer Life Writing course are now open on the Litfest workshops website.

For full programme go to the Litfest website and for tickets go to the Dukes what’s on website:

Litfest is one of the oldest literature festivals in the country, creating a wide variety of events for its audiences since 1978, always championing the local, the national and the international.