Happy Birthday Booker - Kate Mosse, Hardeep Singh Kohli and Victoria Glendinning, 6pm, £10

In her unique blend of brio and perceptive wit, Marina Lewycka follows her best-selling, award-winning A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian with a novel that charts the fortunes of an assortment of immigrant workers while strawberry picking in Kent. Daljit Nagra’s Look We Have Coming to Dover! is a prize-winning collection of poems about assimilation, aspiration and dislocation, rich in humour. Can literary comedy highlight social issues? Marina Lewycka, whose background is Ukrainian, was born in a refugee camp in Germany. Daljit Nagra’s parents came to the UK from the Punjab in the 50s.

Alison Light’s Mrs Woolf and the Servants aired Bloomsbury’s dirty laundry in public and retrieved the lives of women who had been relegated to the margins of history. In Who Was Sophie? Celia Robertson tells the story of her grandmother’s journey from Joan Adeney Easdale, child protégée and Hogarth Press poet, to anonymous bag lady. Alison Light, whose grandmother was in service, is a cultural historian; Celia Robertson worked as an actress.They discuss the complex truths revealed by their assiduous sleuthing with novelist Giles Waterfield, curator of the NPG Below Stairs exhibition.

Jane Austen said that ‘the person, be it gentleman or lady, who has no pleasure in a novel must be intolerably stupid’. But is knowledge of the fundamentals of science more important in the age of climate change and cloning? For the motion: Richard Fortey, palaeontologist and author of Dry Store Room No.1:The Secret History of the Natural History Museum; Georgina Ferry, science writer and author of Max Perutz And The Secret Life. Against the motion: John Mullan, Professor of English at UCL, journalist and author of Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature;Tracy Chevalier, novelist - The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Burning Bright – and Chair of the Society of Authors. Chairperson: Joan Bakewell, Chair of the National Campaign for the Arts, is a pioneering journalist, cultural commentator and author. The audience decides the outcome by casting a vote.

In his account of an Elizabethan golden age, Earls of Paradise, retold through the varying fortunes of the Pembrokes of Wilton – the inspiration for writers and artists including Raleigh, Donne, Inigo Jones,Van Dyck and Shakespeare – Adam Nicolson explores dreams of rural perfection. His illustrated talk considers whether Elizabethan Britain embodied a more ideal way of living than ours. Adam Nicolson is an award-winning author. Charles Saumarez-Smith, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy, has written about Castle Howard.

How does one cope after leaving the best club in London after 51 years? Since resigning from Parliament, Tony Benn’s energy for campaigns and controversies has not wavered. In the latest (8th) volume of his diaries, he weaves the personal and the political into a warm and revelatory whole.Tony Benn – a one-man antidote to the cynicism of modern politics – talks about his long political career, his passions (including triple-cheese pizzas, coca-cola and baked beans) and ideals.

How can one account for the surge of interest in natural history? Mark Cocker’s Crow Country and Polly Devlin’s A Year in the Life of an English Meadow were both instant successes. Crow Country is a paean to Cocker’s corvine obsession; Polly Devlin’s book is a tribute to an almost lost way of life.They discuss their passions with Andrew McNeillie, poet and editor of Archipelago, a journal dedicated to the British landscape. Mark Cocker is one of our foremost writers on nature. Polly Devlin is a well-known author and broadcaster.Andrew McNeillie co-edited Virginia Woolf’s Diaries.

A.L. Kennedy, whose work is distinctive for its dark humour and linguistic brilliance, is the winner of the Costa Book of the Year for her novel, Day, about the impact of war on an ordinary soldier. She is also an award-winning short story writer. Lorrie Moore is one of America’s greatest authors. Her ferociously funny stories ‘pack more wit and tragic-power into a single paragraph than most novels manage over fifteen chapters’ – Helen Simpson. Moore’s novels include Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? They read from and discuss their work with Di Speirs, Radio 4 producer and judge of the BBC National Short Story Award.

Helen Dunmore’s novel, Counting the Stars, tells the story of the poet Catullus’ tormented relationship with his secret mistress, Clodia – the subject of his most passionate verse – set against the backdrop of Julius Caesar’s Rome. Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip, set on a strife-riddled tropical island in New Guinea where a single white man re-tells Dickens’ Great Expectations to the rapt inhabitants, is a haunting tour-de-force which has become an international best-seller. Helen Dunmore was the first winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, Lloyd Jones, who lives in New Zealand, is a prolific writer.

Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End is a candid and amusing book about getting old, including the decline of sexual desire. Katherine Whitehorn’s Selective Memory is equally honest and unflinching about her career, long marriage and grief at the loss of her husband. Diana Athill is a distinguished editor and has written five volumes of memoirs; Katherine Whitehorn is a groundbreaking journalist and author.They discuss the pleasures and pains of looking back, together with Lynne Truss, novelist and bestselling author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

Michael Billington, drama critic of the Guardian since 1971 and author of biographies of Harold Pinter and Peggy Ashcroft, believes British theatre is a microcosm of the outside world. Christopher Hampton is one of our most lauded playwrights and screenwriters. His dramas include The Philanthropist, Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Embers, and his screen-plays include Atonement and Carrington. He has also directed and written lyrics for musicals and operas. They discuss the interplay between the performing arts and society with William Nicholson, playwright (Shadowlands) and screen-writer (Elizabeth: the Golden Age).

Some intimate relationships transcend boundaries. Jane Dunn’s Read My Heart is the love story of Dorothy Osborne and Sir William Temple, whose families were opposed during the Civil War, and who, after their marriage, jointly occupied a pivotal role in C17th social and political life. Frances Wilson’s The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth sheds light on the complex literary and bohemian relationship between the poet and his sister, who was also his muse. Jane Dunn’s previous books were Elizabeth and Mary and Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy. Frances Wilson’s previous book was The Courtesan’s Revenge.

She has filmed David Beckham sleeping and made grown men cry. Now artist Sam Taylor-Wood has just finished directing a short film, Love You More, with a script by Patrick Marber. Inspired by the Buzzcocks single of the same name, the film is a tender love-story set in the heady punk days of 1978. Sam Taylor-Wood takes photographs and makes films that examine our shared social and psychological experiences. Patrick Marber is a playwright (Dealer’s Choice, Closer and Don Juan in Soho) and screenwriter (Notes on a Scandal). He is currently adapting Ian McEwan’s Saturday for the screen. They discuss their creative collaboration.

Wednesday 21 May
Virginia Woolf and the Cinema: Engagements and Adaptations
workshop will look at the attitudes of Bloomsbury, and Virginia Woolf in particular, to the new art of the film in the 1920s and 30s. Focusing on Woolf's 1926 essay 'The Cinema', and Clive Bell's writings on experimental cinema it will explore how Woolf's work, from 'Kew Gardens' to the fiction of the late 1930s, took up the devices of the film medium.

Thursday 22 May
Orlando
Orlando explores the extraordinary character of Vita Sackville-West, her family’s relationship with history; her quixotic sexuality and personality as a writer.Woolf set out to produce an ‘odder, deeper, more angular’ version of the story.The workshop will consider Orlando, not only as Virginia Woolf ’s tribute to her muse, but as an ingenious narrative experiment which, though written with enormous poetic license, nevertheless gets to the heart of her subject. Led by Dr. Sue Roe, author of Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf ’s Writing Practice.

Friday 23 May
Investigating Lives: decoding the art of biography
The one-day workshop, led by Laura Thompson, will concentrate on the art of biography: what particular difficulties - practical, literary, ethical - does the genre present? It will have special reference to Laura Thompson's latest book Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. This definitive portrait of a remarkable woman was written with unprecedented access to private papers and was informed by interviews with Christie’s family: her grandson and, before they died, her daughter and son-in-law.The workshop is in conjunction with Brighton City Reads (www.cityreads.co.uk), a series of special events devoted to crime fiction.

Where do I get tickets?
Event tickets available from the Dome Box Office, 29 New Road, Brighton, BN1 1UG, Telephone 01273 709709, www.brightonticketshop.com and from our website, www.charleston.org.uk

There is special Festival shuttle bus service from Lewes Station. The timetable is on the Charleston website at www.charleston.org.uk

Open 31 March – 28 October 2007 Wednesdays - Sundays
Enquiries 01323 811265 e-mail info@charleston.org.uk
Charleston, Firle, Lewes, East Sussex BN8 6LL

The Charleston Festival is a fundraising event in aid of the Charleston Trust, Registered Charity No. 1107313.