2026 Speakers

Partita

Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver joins us with Partita—the story of a brief, passionate, life-changing love affair, wrapped up in what might be the greatest romance of all: our eternal human longing for art and beauty.

Kin

Tayari Jones will be discussing Kin, an unforgettable novel about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

The Correspondent

Virginia Evans joins us to discuss The Correspondent, an internationally-bestselling debut that follows the bold and charming seventy-three-year-old Sybil van Antwerp through her correspondence with friends, family members, neighbors, and family writers; told entirely through letters and emails. 

Heart the Lover

Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Lily King will discuss Heart the Lover, her beloved new novel that explores desire, friendship, loss, and the lasting impact of first love.

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…

Steven Pinker, one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, will discuss When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…, a brilliantly insightful work that explores the hidden logic of common knowledge.

Show Don’t Tell

Bestselling author of Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld joins us to discuss Show Don't Tell, her second short story collection, that conjuries up characters so real that they seem like old friends and lays bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.

Strangers

Lawyer and writer Belle Burden presents her searing memoir, Strangers, exploring how Burden's twenty-year-long marriage came to an abrupt end. A national sensation with unflinching honesty and profound grace that captures Burden’s unyielding spirit. 

Lázár

Swiss author Nelio Biedermann will be joining the Festival to discuss his sensational debut novel, Lázár, the gothic, intergenerational family saga capturing the rise and fall of an aristocratic Hungarian family inspired by the author’s lineage. 

Angel Down

Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize, Daniel Kraus joins the Festival to discuss Angel Down, the story of five WWI soldiers who discover a fallen angel in No Man’s Land, written as a single, unbroken sentence. 

Triage

Renowned poet Claudia Rankine introduces Triage—her most emotionally resonant writing yet—which follows the turbulent friendship between two self-identified sisters as they invent a game of “collapse” and how decades morph the meaning of the word for them. 

In the Realm of the Last Man

Political economist Francis Fukuyama, bestselling author of The End of History and the Last Man, charts his political and intellectual evolution across five transformative decades in his new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man. 

The Declaration of Independence

Harvard Professor David Armitage joins the Festival to discuss his seminal book, The Declaration of Independence, which revealed the historical document in a light unlike any other; a timely reflection for the 250th anniversary of the United States. 

Ply

Hernan Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Trust, will be joining us to discuss his newest novel Ply, a futuristic story about an orphan adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation that examines technology’s role in the American imagination. 

The Family Man

James Lasdun will discuss The Family Man, his immersive account of the Murdaugh family through the serial embezzlements, fatal boat crash, and other events leading up to the slaughter at Moselle—in one of the most high-profile and sensational trials of South Carolina’s history. 

Small Town Girls

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Night Watch Jayne Anne Phillips will discuss her newest book Small Town Girls, her writer’s memoir written in a series of luminous essays that is part coming-of-age, part social history in the distinctly Appalachian small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. 

Fly, Wild Swans

Jung Chang returns to Charleston Literary Festival to discuss the magnificent follow-up to her acclaimed memoir, Wild Swans. Chang’s newest book, Fly, Wild Swans, traces the history of modern China through three generations of courageous women in Chang’s family and is written as a love letter to her mother.

1873

From Liaquat Ahamed, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lords of Finance, comes 1873 a magnificent and timely reckoning with the first truly global financial calamity and the illustrious Rothschild family at the center of the Gilded Age whirlwind. 

Unsayable

Michael Cunningham returns to Charleston this fall with Unsayable. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author shares his intimate memoir that is an ode to literature, a meditation on craft, and an intimate account of a life spent trying to put into words that which resists depiction.

The Mattering Instinct

Award-winning philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein explores humanity’s most fundamental desire in The Mattering Instinct and argues that the need to matter is the source of our greatest progress and our deepest conflicts: the crux of the human experience.

How to be Heard

Roxane Gay, the prominent novelist, bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist, provides practical guidance for everyone who wants to use their voice to write powerful work to share with the world in her newest book, How to be Heard. 

Joyride

From Susan Orlean comes Joyride, a masterful memoir of Orlean finding her creative calling and purpose that invites us to approach life with wonder, curiosity, and an irrepressible sense of delight.