Our new season starts on 20th October 2026- please see details below.
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Lewes Literary Society
Daniel Hahn
20th October 2026
Tuesday 20 October, 2026 All Saints Centre, Lewes, 7.30pm (doors open 7pm)
Daniel Hahn is an internationally recognised writer, editor and translator. If This be Magic, the latest of his many books, describes and questions the various ways Shakespeare has been translated. Praised by the Guardian as ‘superbly diverting’, this book plus more general asides about some of the annoyances and pleasures of translation will be the main theme of his talk.
Photo credit : Camila França Photography
Tom Shone
24th November 2026
Tuesday 24 November, 2026 All Saints Centre, Lewes, 7.30pm (doors open 7pm)
Tom Shone, film critic for the Sunday Times and writer of many books about film including the best seller The Nolan Variations, will be talking about his latest book (to be published in November), based on the making of Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming film adaptation for Netflix of C.S. Lewes’s The Magician’s Nephew (2027). Tom spent the best part of last year on set with Greta Gerwig, while she filmed the first of what the studio hope will be a seven-film series.
Tom will discuss how the building of worlds is no longer confined to the fantasy shelves of bookstores and how Hollywood has increasingly staked its future on the one thing it knows how to do best: the creation of fictional worlds. He will also explore how traditional models of film production and distribution are being eroded by digital streaming giants such as Amazon and Netflix.
Born in Sussex, Tom lived in the US for 25 years before returning to Lewes in 2024.
Photo credit: Kathryn Burton
Noel Streatfeild
24th January 2027
Sunday, 24 January, 2027 All Saints Centre, Lewes 2pm (doors open 1:30pm)
Our annual celebration of a children’s writer with local connections features Noel Streatfeild and her first children’s book, Ballet Shoes (1936). Kim Reynolds will be joined by Nicholas Tucker and Dame Jacqueline Wilson as they explore this richly layered book and its many adaptations.
Helen Bain
23rd February 2027
Tuesday 23 February, 2027 All Saints Centre, Lewes, 7.30pm (doors open 7pm)
Helen Bain will be talking about her debut novel, The Daffodil Days, a reimagining of the poet Sylvia Plath’s life in Devon in the early 1960s. Published in 2026 by Bloomsbury, it was described by the Guardian as ‘a virtuoso portrait… an astonishing achievement’ and by the Mail on Sunday as ‘cleverly quiet… old-fashioned and radical’.
Helen has a PhD in creative writing from King’ College London and MA degrees in modern and contemporary literature and creative writing. She was selected for The London Library Emerging Writers Programme and The Genesis Foundation Emerging Writers Programme, and in 2024, she won The People’ Friend Comedy Fiction Prize. Currently working at the Financial Times, she has worked for British Vogue and the Guardian.
Helen grew up in Lewes and now lives in Sussex.
Photo credit: Sarah Weal
Eleanor Shearer
23rd March 2027
Tuesday 23 March 2027 All Saints Centre, Lewes, 7.30pm (doors open 7pm)
Eleanor Shearer is a mixed-race writer whose work focuses on the Caribbean in the aftermath of slavery and what it means to be free. Her first novel, River Sing Me Home, was a Good Morning America Book Club pick, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and one of TIME’s Must-Read Books of 2023.
She will mostly be talking about her second novel, Fireflies in Winter, a queer love story set in 1790s Nova Scotia, which was released in February 2026. Eleanor is also a Senior Research Fellow at the progressive think tank Common Wealth, where her work focuses on reparations and the history of extractive capitalism in the Caribbean. Her talk will examine why the stories we tell about the end of slavery matter, the “memory gap” between British and Caribbean narratives about enslavement, and what this means for contemporary politics.
Photo credit: Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
Shady Lewis
20th April 2027
Tuesday 20 April, 2027 All Saints Centre, Lewes, 7.30pm (doors open 7pm)
Shady Lewis, is an Egyptian novelist and journalist whose writing centres on cultural and political intersections within and beyond the Arab world. His novel On the Greenwich Line, first published in Arabic in 2020, traces the absurdities of racism, austerity, and bureaucracy in contemporary England. It is set in an East London housing office where a frustrated local government employee spends his days trying to figure out what the latest policy announcement means for both himself and the migrants he works with daily. While helping a friend arrange a funeral for a young Syrian refugee, he realises just how much he has in common with those who have fallen through the cracks.
The English translation by Katherine Halls was published in 2025 and won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2026
Photo credit: Shady Lewis