A selection of bookshop readings, performances, literary lunches, salons, festivals and other writerly goings-on are listed here and regularly updated.
For your wider literary and cultural fix, check out the in-person and virtual event listings at the British Library, the London Review Bookshop, Waterstones, English PEN, the Southbank Centre, publisher and author websites and social media streams, as well as those of your local organisations and venues.
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Thursday 18 to Saturday 20 June
Capital Crime 2026
Leonardo Royal St Paul’s, 10 Godliman St, London, EC4V 5AJ
Full festival ticket £195
Day Ticket (Friday & Saturday) £100
Individual events from £15
Capital Crime is one of the world’s largest celebrations of crime and thriller fiction, delivering a packed schedule of entertaining and thought-provoking events. This year’s line-up includes Elly Griffiths & Claire Douglas, Abir Mukherjee & Sarah Vaughan, Imran Mahmood & Harriet Tyce, Lisa Jewell & Sabine Durrant, Clare Mackintosh, Sophie Hannah, Jeffrey Archer in conversation with David Headley, Janice Hallett & Jeremy Vine in conversation with Mark Edwards, and much more.
More info and book
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to Tuesday 28 July
The Conversation 2026 Spring/Summer Season: Beyond Algorithms. Beyond Orthodoxy. Real Insight for a Just World
St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 4JJ
7 pm to 8:30 pm
£10 in-person or live stream + £3.95 booking fee
The Conversation, held in the atmospheric Crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields, explores social justice and how we imagine the world with curiosity, knowledge and wisdom – a humane intelligence that values insight and understanding over news and information. The interviews take place live and online, chaired by series director Peter Florence, Caitlin McNamara and Sam Wells. They last an hour followed by a 30-minute public Q&A, then a book-signing and informal conversation.
Tuesday 16 June
Jonathan Sumption: The Challenges of Democracy, and the Rule of Law
Tuesday 23 June
Oliver Bullough: Everybody Loves Our Dollars – How Money Laundering Won
Tuesday 30 June
Ali Smith: The Way We Live Now
Tuesday 7 July
Jackie Morris & Robert Macfarlane: The Book of Birds – Words and Painting
Tuesday 14 July
Janina Ramirez: Legenda
Tuesday 28 July
Andrea Wulf: The Traveller – The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and His Search for Humanity
More info and book
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to Sunday 28 June
Tishani Doshi: Egrets, While War
Poet, novelist and dancer Tishani Doshi launched her fifth poetry collection, published by Bloodaxe Books on 21 May, with a series of events in the UK and Ireland, starting with online readings and ending at Ledbury Poetry Festival. Tishani has devised a dance piece which she will be performing at festivals including Dalkey Book Festival and Ledbury. The timely, powerful and sometimes playful poems of Egrets, While War explore environmental loss, ancestral memory, the slow transformations of ageing, and the devastations of war. But as the American writer Aimee Nezhukumatathil puts it: “Even as war and extinction press close, Doshi keeps turning us toward astonishment, toward the tender fact of being alive together in a world that is breaking and still unbearably radiant.”
Thursday 18 June
Manchester Writing School Summer Festival
Saturday 20 June
Dalkey Book Festival: Film, spoken word and dance performance
Sunday 28 June
Ledbury Poetry Festival: Dance performance
More info and book
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Ongoing
Arvon courses and retreats
Online or in-person, from one hour at home to five weeks at historic writers’ houses in Devon, Shropshire and Yorkshire, you can find inspiration, support and transform your writing with Arvon. Discover a range of creative writing courses and events for writers of any genre and any level of experience.
Residential courses for Spring/Summer 2026 include Starting to Write with Tice Cin, Ralf Webb and Ashley Hickson-Lovence (Totleigh Barton, 15 to 20 June); The Craft of Character-Driven Fiction with Freya North, Matt Cain and Clare Pooley (The Hurst, 22 to 27 June); Writing Lives with John Grindrod, Lamorna Ash and Matt Morgan (Totleigh Barton, 13 to 18 July); Writing the World Through a Queer Lens with Nathan Evans and Santanu Bhattacharya (The Hurst, 13 to 16 July); and Inspiration, Support and Time to Write with Ben Pester, Kaiya Shang and Karolina Sutton (Totleigh Barton, 25 July to 1 August).
More info and book
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