For more than seventy years (2018 was our anniversary year!), we’ve been running an annual programme of talks and readings by distinguished speakers from many areas of literary endeavour – novelists, poets, playwrights, biographers, historians, literary critics and travel writers, as well as illustrators and cartoonists.

Leonard Woolf was president of the Club from 1954 until 1969, and our current presidents are Grace Nichols and John Agard. In 2021 both our presidents were awarded prestigious prizes: Grace received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and John received the Book Trust’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Congratulations to both!

In October 2015 we gave ourselves a new name – the Lewes Literary Society – and a new home. Since then our events have been held at the All Saints Centre on Friars Walk. And since All Saints couldn’t offer us our usual Monday slot, our events moved to Tuesdays – which is why we felt the need to change our name from the Monday Literary Society to the Lewes Literary Society, known more casually as Lewes Lit. You can hear our Chair, Miriam Moss, talking about our relaunch on the October 2015 Love Lewes podcast (this part of the conversation starts about 23:30 minutes in).

When the COVID pandemic struck in 2020, we went online, offering talks from the same high quality speakers via Zoom. We are back in person from October 2022, and we look forward to welcoming you to this season’s exciting events.