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Tuesday 26th November, All Saints Centre, Lewes, 7.30pm (doors open 7pm)
Arifa Akbar is chief theatre critic for The Guardian. A journalist of 25 years, she was previously the literary editor of The Independent where she also held positions as a news reporter and arts correspondent. She has been head of content at publisher, Unbound, and arts editor at Tortoise Media. Her first book, Consumed: In Search of my Sister was published in June 2021. It was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, PEN Ackerley Prize and Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Her second book, After Sunset: a journey into the dark, is due to be published in June 2025.
Photo credit: Jocelyn Nguyen
Sunday 26th January, All Saints Centre, Lewes, 2.30pm (doors open 2pm)
Dame Jacqueline Wilson will lead a discussion of Eve Garnett’s The Family from One End Street (1937), her classic children’s book set in and around Lewes. Still in print, this prize-winning novel has been mostly praised but also occasionally criticised for the way it introduces a cheerful working-class family into the pre-war middle-class world of children’s fiction. The author’s illustrations show many still recognisable Lewes locations, some of which feature on the linked, but separately organised Garnett walk. Tea and cake will be served during a short interval.
This event is for adults (15+), with pre-purchased tickets or admission at the door costing £15. There will be a separate children’s event celebrating Garnett’s book at Lewes Library. Check their website for details.
Tuesday 25th February, All Saints Centre, Lewes, 7.30pm (doors open 7pm)
Neil Gower is an internationally acclaimed graphic artist, whose work includes book-jacket design, literary cartography, and paintings of some of the most celebrated estates and gardens in the UK and abroad. He grew up in South Wales and studied illustration at Brighton under the tutelage of Raymond Briggs. He has created maps for works by Simon Armitage, Jilly Cooper and Kazuo Ishiguro, among others. Neil was a contributing artist to Conde Nast Traveller in New York for ten years, and his work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Economist, and Vanity Fair. As Kingfisher Catch Fire: Birds and Books, his collaboration with author Alex Preston, was published by Corsair in 2021 and Meet Me in Palermo, his first collection of poetry, by the Frogmore Press in 2021.
Photo credit: Jay Armstrong
Tuesday 25th March, All Saints Centre, Lewes, 7.30pm (doors open 7pm)
Ciar Byrne is a local writer and journalist whose debut novel A Deadly Discovery is the first in a series of Golden Age murder mysteries starring Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell as a pair of unlikely amateur sleuths. She will talk about how her book is inspired by the landscape and history of Lewes and the surrounding countryside, including Woolf’s home at Monk’s House in Rodmell and Charleston farmhouse where Bell lived with fellow artist Duncan Grant. When she is not dreaming up Agatha Christie-style plots involving members of the Bloomsbury Group, Ciar is a gardening journalist for the Daily Mail and The Lady magazine, and a former reporter for The Independent, The Guardian and Private Eye.
Photo credit: Sarah Weal
Tuesday 29th April, All Saints Centre, Lewes, 7.30pm (doors open 7pm)
One of the leading social historians of our time, David Kynaston was born in Aldershot in 1951 and has been a professional historian since the 1970s. He has written on a wide range of subjects, including the Victorian working class, the City of London, cricket, and the private school question. But he is best known for his multi-volume social history of post-war Britain, Tales of a New Jerusalem. The most recent instalment, A Northern Wind: Britain, 1962-65, was published in September 2023.
Photo credit: Jonathan Ring