2026 Events

To close this year’s festival we are delighted to welcome the masterful Ian McEwan to talk about his new novel, What We Can Know. A quest, a literary thriller and a love story, the novel moves between the present day and a climate-ravaged future – a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost. In conversation with author Alex Preston.

Ian McEwan is an award-winning author of 19 novels and two short story collections. He has won the Somerset Maugham Award; Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; and the Booker Prize. His novels Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Alex Preston is a journalist and author. His fictional works include This Bleeding City; The Revelations; In Love and War; and Winchelsea.

• £35 one ticket plus one book: What We Know (RRP £22)
• £50 two tickets plus one book: What We Know (RRP £22)