2026 Programme of Events

8pm – Festival 2026 Welcome Gathering Supper

As our guests, speakers and participants arrive in Corfu, join us for the Festival’s traditional informal opening supper — a chance to catch up, meet new friends and begin the week together.

7pm – Christos Anesti and The New Byzantines

The Festival returns to the Corfu Reading Society, where it began in 2018, for an evening of poetry and conversation.

Poet Sylvie Baumgarten reads from Christos Anesti, her collection reflecting on Greece and her time in Corfu.

She is followed by journalist and writer Alex Sakalis, in conversation with author Sean Mathews about his book The New Byzantines.

Kindly supported by the Michael Marks Foundation.

11am – Icon: Its place in Greek Art, Culture and Soul

Icon artist and historian Magdalini Dimoudi explores the history and meaning of the icon in Greek art, faith and culture, and its place within the wider development of European civilisation.

The talk takes place in the Byzantine Museum of Antivouniotissa, housed in the 15th-century Church of Antivouniotissa, and will be followed by a walk through the Campiello district of Corfu’s UNESCO-listed Old Town.

7pm – Wild Places, Human Lives

Julian Hoffman, winner of the 2026 Runciman Award for Lifelines, writes about landscape, belonging and his life among the mountains and lakes of northern Greece.

He joins journalist, sailor and environmental writer Susan Smillie, whose The Half Bird recounts her voyage from England to Greece aboard her boat Isean, for a conversation about wild places and the lives we make within them.

7pm – Spies in Fact and Fiction

Festival co-founder and novelist Alex Preston discusses A Stranger in Corfu, his novel set on the island of Vido and exploring the psychological aftermath of a life shaped by secrecy, deception and risk.

He is joined by Antonia Senior, historical fiction critic for The Times, author of Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire and host of The Spymasters Podcast.

The conversation is chaired by Miranda Carter, author of Anthony Blunt: His Lives, bringing together three writers steeped in the history and fiction of espionage.

followed by
Look What You Made Me Do

John Lanchester, contributing editor at the London Review of Books and author of six books, discusses his latest novel, Look What You Made Me Do, a black comedy about two women from different generations caught in a battle over storytelling, power and entitlement.

In conversation with Dan Richards.

10am – Butterflies in Corfu’s Countryside

We travel from Corfu Town to Old Perithia, the historic village on the slopes of Mount Pantokrator, for a morning exploring Corfu’s natural landscape.

Anna Sordinas of Corfu Butterfly Conservation leads a walk with Julian Hoffman, looking for some of the island’s many species of butterfly and experiencing the countryside that inspired Durrell’s “Garden of the Gods”.

We finish with lunch at a local taverna, joined by Dr Simon Karythis, Executive Director of the Ionian Environment Foundation.

7pm – Women and Their Secrets

Writer and editor Cali Doxiadis worked in politics and journalism. Her trilogy One Story Only, begun during lockdown, follows one family across 150 years of Greek history.

Juliet Nicolson is an author of social history and memoir whose latest book, The Book of Revelations, explores the secrets women keep, the reasons they remain unspoken and what happens when they are finally revealed.

Together they discuss family, secrecy and the stories we choose to tell.

Chaired by Dr Adam Rutherford.

followed by
Families – Fabulous and Fractious

Esther Freud, whose first novel Hideous Kinky was adapted into a film starring Kate Winslet, has returned throughout her fiction to unconventional lives and complicated families.

Sofka Zinovieff, author of six books, has similarly explored family, inheritance and the ways in which memory shapes relationships across generations.

Freud and Zinovieff discuss the pleasures and tensions of writing about families – real, imagined and somewhere in between.

Presented in partnership with the Ionian University.

7pm – 250 Years of America: Journey Through Time - Live!

To mark the 250th anniversary of American independence, historians Sarah Churchwell and David Olusoga, presenters of the acclaimed podcast Journey Through Time, take us on a voyage through the history of the United States.

Through the choices, accidents and turning points that have shaped the country, they ask how America became the nation it is today – and what its history can tell us about where it might go next.

followed by
The Odyssey: A Performance

Washed ashore on Scheria, Odysseus is welcomed by Princess Nausicaa and her father, King Alcinous. In return for their hospitality, he tells the story of his ten-year journey home from Troy: The Odyssey.

Corfu has long been identified with Homer’s Scheria, making the island a fitting setting in which to hear the story retold.

In a candlelit courtyard, film director Tom Edmunds presents a performance of Homer’s epic, with David Harewood as Odysseus and Katie Leung as Penelope.

An ancient story of wandering, homecoming and the pull of home, returned to the island where Odysseus finally found refuge.