Lewes Literary Society

Our 2023-2024 season begins on 17th October with Elly Griffiths, best-selling author of the Brighton Mysteries!

Unless otherwise advertised, all talks are at the All Saints Centre, Lewes, at 8pm, doors open 7.30pm.

To book tickets for this season’s events, click here. Please note season tickets can be collected in person at the first talk of the Autumn on Tuesday 17th October.

If you’d like to be added to our mailing list, which is only used to remind you to book for our talks, please contact us here.

Rebecca Stott

21st November 2023

Rebecca Stott is a novelist, historian, scriptwriter and broadcaster and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She will be talking about her most recent novel Dark Earth, set in the ruins of Londinium in the sixth century, which was described by the Observer as ‘radically new and beautiful’.

Her family memoir In the Days of Rain won the Costa Biography prize in 2017. She has taught literature and writing in universities for 32 years including most recently as Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at UEA but has now given up teaching to write full-time. She is currently working on a television series on Boudicca.

Rebecca moved to Lewes in 2022.

Raymond Briggs Symposium

28th January 2024

On Sunday, January 28, 2-4 pm, there will be a celebration for a 15+ adult audience of the brilliant illustrator Raymond Briggs, who lived locally and died last year. Fellow-illustrator John Vernon Lord and Guardian cartoonist Chris Riddell will be among those talking about him while also displaying some of his inimitable art. Tea will be served halfway through.

There will be a separate event for under-15s in association with Lewes Library. Details and booking information will be available at www.eastsussex.gov.uk/libraryevents nearer the time.

Dave Goulson

27th February 2024

Dave Goulson is Professor of Biology at Sussex University, specialising in bee ecology. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller A Sting in the Tale, a popular science book about bumblebees which was shortlisted for the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize. This was followed by A Buzz in the Meadow, Bee Quest, The Garden Jungle, and Gardening for Bumblebees. His most recent book, Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse was published in 2021. He will talk about the challenges faced by the insect world.

Nancy Campbell

26th March 2024

Nancy Campbell’s latest book, Thunderstone, is a memoir of life after lockdown in an old Buccaneer caravan. In 2020 Nancy received the Royal Geographical Society Ness Award for environmental writing for a decade-long response to the polar regions across non-fiction (The Library of Ice), poetry (Disko Bay) and artist’s books (How to Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic). The poems written during her two-year role as Canal Laureate for The Poetry Society were installed along the waterways where they could be seen projected on wharves at night, stencilled on towpaths, or engraved into fish gates; they are collected in the pamphlet Navigations. Another pamphlet of prose poems, Uneasy Pieces, was published by Guillemot Press in 2022. Nancy has held numerous international research residencies, most recently as Visiting Professor of Literature at the Free University of Berlin.

Kate Mosse

23rd April 2024

Kate Mosse, novelist and co-founder of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, will talk about her work including her latest book, The Ghost Ship, an epic novel about a mysterious boat with a female captain fighting slave traders on the Barbary Coast, inspired by real life female pirates. It it the latest in the Joubert family chronicles, following the fortunes of a French Huguenot family from Carcassonne to Amsterdam to the Canary Islands and South Africa.

Mosse, who is the co-founder of the Women’s Prize for Fiction is the author of nine novels and short story collections, as well as non-fiction books including Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries. She shot to fame in 2005 with Labyrinth, the first book in her Languedoc trilogy.

In 2013, she was awarded an OBE for services to literature and women. She is married to the playwright Greg Mosse with two adult children and lives in West Sussex and South West France.