Fiction and storytelling are art forms shared across the languages of the world. This lecture celebrates the diversity of this artform from an international perspective, inviting world-renowned authors to discuss the role of literary fiction in life, politics and culture.
The Lancaster International Fiction Lecture takes place online.
Tuesday 21 October 2025, 7pm
Xiaolu Guo: ‘Fiction as an Exercise in Sabotage’ In conversation with Derek Hird
Litfest is delighted that the 5th Lancaster International Fiction Lecture, a joint venture with the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (FHASS) at Lancaster University, will be given by British-Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo.
Writer and film-maker Xiaolu Guo wrote her first books in Mandarin, but when she moved to the UK to study film in 2002 she began writing in English. Her first English novel was A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, about which Ursula Le wrote: ‘It succeeds in luring the western reader into an alien way of thinking: a trick only novels can pull off, and indeed one of their finest tricks’ (Guardian). Since then Xiaolu’s books and films have attracted many awards and wide, admiring attention.
In her provocative, playful and entertaining lecture she asks the question: How ‘can someone who spent 30 years writing in pictograms and ideograms and who inherited eastern philosophies, enter an alphabetic language and take on Western narratives?’
Please register to attend: https://litfest.org/events/fiction-lecture-25/
A fantastic lecture by Guadelupe Nettel (translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey), delivered during the Litfest Autumn Weekend 2024.
Why do you think that, even now, in the twenty-first century, books are being banned? They are banned because they liberate, because they open minds.
For Litfest’s Autumn Weekend 2023, the International Fiction Lecture was delivered by Georgi Gospodinov, winner of the 2023 Booker International Prize for the novel Time Shelter.
We live in a world where there is no longer a centre and a periphery. When we have a pandemic, war or catastrophe, the centre of pain is everywhere.
As part of Litfest’s Autumn Weekend 2022, we were delighted to welcome Booker International Prize winner Geetanjali Shree, who gave the second annual Lancaster International Fiction Lecture on Tuesday, 11 October 2022. You can catch up via the online streaming platform Crowdcast.
Geetanjali Shree: Writing in Troubled TimesFiction came to us from the West. Creativity did not. A long lineage of art and literature enriched imagination and expression here.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez gave the inaugural Lancaster International Fiction Lecture on Tuesday, 12 October 2021 at 7:30pm as part of Litfest’s first ‘Autumn Weekend’.
This, I believe, is fiction’s claim to being an international art form: its ability to liberate us from our frustratingly limited perspectives on life.
