Cambridge Literary Festival – Winter Festival 2026

The Cambridge Literary Festival returns for its Winter Festival on Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 November, running across various venues throughout the city. It's the second outing of the year, following the Spring Festival, and it packs around 30 events into a single weekend. The programme reaches across fiction and poetry, history, politics, current affairs and the natural world, with writers and thinkers talking through their work and the issues shaping the world. One-off events, schools sessions and children's programming sit alongside the main strand.

The line-up is a broad one. You'll find Zahra Joya, Michael Morpurgo, Emily Wilson, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Patrick Gale, Laura Kuenssberg, Sathnam Sanghera, Mariana Mazzucato, John Robins, Elif Shafak, Sarah Churchwell, Hermione Lee, Luke Harding, A.K. Blakemore and Hugh Bonneville. It's a mix of novelists, journalists, historians and broadcasters, so there's plenty to pick from whether you're into politics, poetry or the natural world.

Tickets are sold in stages, which is worth keeping in mind if you've got your eye on a particular session. Priority booking goes first to Patrons and Benefactors, then to Friends of the Festival, before it opens to general sale. The festival notes that the winter programme often sells out quickly, so it pays to move early. If you want to get ahead of the rush, you can become a Friend of the Festival, which secures you two seats at the best-selling events before they're available to the public. The whole thing runs across the weekend of 21 and 22 November, with sessions spread across different venues around Cambridge.