CHARLESTON READS
Historian Lindsay Schakenbach Regele’s book, Flowers, Guns, and Money, investigates the life of botanist and trader Joel Roberts Poinsett. A confidant of Andrew Jackson and former member of South Carolina Legislature, Joel Roberts Poinsett introduced poinsettias to America, and fought surreptitiously in Chile’s War for Independence. In her book, Schakenbach Regele reveals an America defined by opportunity and violence, freedom and slavery, nationalism and self-interest. In conversation with Dr. Kim Cliett Long, academic, educator and Project Administrator of Jonathan Green’s Maritime Cultural Center at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.

Many Festival events are filmed and recorded for archival and research purposes, and occasionally for further distribution, such as promotional opportunities, on our website, and for network television. The films might sometimes include recognizable shots of members of the audience and/or interviews with patrons before or after the live events. Purchase of this ticket implies your permission to be filmed.

Andrey Kurkov is Ukraine’s most celebrated author, both in his home country and internationally. He is a former President of PEN Ukraine, and a widely recognized public intellectual whose voice is respected all over the world.

In his special appearance at the Festival, Andrey Kurkov will discuss his novels, characterized by their dark humor, including the best-selling Death and the Penguin and his most recent crime thriller The Stolen Heart: The Kyiv Mysteries. He will also reflect on the role of the arts and artists in troubled times.

Many Festival events are filmed and recorded for archival and research purposes, and occasionally for further distribution, such as promotional opportunities, on our website, and for network television. The films might sometimes include recognizable shots of members of the audience and/or interviews with patrons before or after the live events. Purchase of this ticket implies your permission to be filmed.

Caryl Phillips is a Kittitian-British author of 12 notable novels and called by The New York Times, “one of the literary giants of our time.” He currently lives in America, and taught creative writing at Yale. A multiple literary award-winner, his new book, Another Man in the Street, is set in an immigrant community of London during the 1960s and beyond. The powerful and haunting story of a West Indian’s search for home and identity pits his dreams against reality.

In conversation with journalist and cultural critic Bilal Qureshi, he discusses his interest in the emotional baggage immigrants bring when they arrive in a new destination and are never able to relinquish.

Many Festival events are filmed and recorded for archival and research purposes, and occasionally for further distribution, such as promotional opportunities, on our website, and for network television. The films might sometimes include recognizable shots of members of the audience and/or interviews with patrons before or after the live events. Purchase of this ticket implies your permission to be filmed.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S SELECTED BOOKS OF 2025
WITH THANKS TO J. JILL 
Katie Kitamura, author of award-winning book Intimacies, discusses her dazzling, destabilizing novel, Audition with author and writer for the New York Review of Books, Regina Marler. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day and the masks we perform.

Many Festival events are filmed and recorded for archival and research purposes, and occasionally for further distribution, such as promotional opportunities, on our website, and for network television. The films might sometimes include recognizable shots of members of the audience and/or interviews with patrons before or after the live events. Purchase of this ticket implies your permission to be filmed.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the scandalous and subversive life of the sexually reckless rock star of Elizabethan theatre Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s greatest rival, and explores his transgressive genius. A poet and a playwright—Tamburlaine and Faustus are dramatic masterpieces about the perils of power—Marlowe was a spy in the Queen’s service accused of heresy and blasphemy owing to his provocative anti-church writings. His mysterious death, murdered in a London inn at the age of 29, adds to his mythological status.

Stephen Greenblatt investigates Marlowe’s daring life and violent death, and his impact on Elizabethan culture, with Geoffrey Harpham, Emeritus Director of National Humanities Center.

Many Festival events are filmed and recorded for archival and research purposes, and occasionally for further distribution, such as promotional opportunities, on our website, and for network television. The films might sometimes include recognizable shots of members of the audience and/or interviews with patrons before or after the live events. Purchase of this ticket implies your permission to be filmed.

THEATER
Best known as a celebrated writer for The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has spent over three decades writing essays, memoirs, and criticism. Also the author of a number of bestselling books including Paris To The Moon and The Real Work, Gopnik now turns his eye to theater.

Join us for this intimate once-off performance of his brand new one-man-show, Talk Therapy.

The play reveals Gopnik’s experiences as a young writer cutting his teeth in the wilds of New York City and the relationships that helped him along the way. 

Many Festival events are filmed and recorded for archival and research purposes, and occasionally for further distribution, such as promotional opportunities, on our website, and for network television. The films might sometimes include recognizable shots of members of the audience and/or interviews with patrons before or after the live events. Purchase of this ticket implies your permission to be filmed.

PRESENTED WITH SPOLETO FESTIVAL USA
A conversation with Adam Gopnik, Stephen Greenblatt, and musicologist Mena Mark Hanna on shaping Greenblatt’s Pulitzer-winning The Swerve into an opera, where history, philosophy, and music converge. Currently in development with Spoleto Festival USA. 

Many Festival events are filmed and recorded for archival and research purposes, and occasionally for further distribution, such as promotional opportunities, on our website, and for network television. The films might sometimes include recognizable shots of members of the audience and/or interviews with patrons before or after the live events. Purchase of this ticket implies your permission to be filmed.

Pulitzer Prize-finalist Adam Haslett, named “one of the country’s most talented writers” (The Wall Street Journal) discusses his latest novel Mothers and Sons with literary critic Bill Goldstein. 

Estranged for many years, a mother and son reckon with the shared secret around an act of violence that drew them apart. In an engrossing story about family and forgiveness, Adam Haslett demonstrates yet again his mastery of “a rich assortment of literary gifts” (The New York Times).

Many Festival events are filmed and recorded for archival and research purposes, and occasionally for further distribution, such as promotional opportunities, on our website, and for network television. The films might sometimes include recognizable shots of members of the audience and/or interviews with patrons before or after the live events. Purchase of this ticket implies your permission to be filmed.

WORLD PREMIERE: OFFICIAL BOOK LAUNCH
PRESENTED WITH VILLA ALBERTINE
Celebrated French author Lola Lafon launches the English language translation of When You Listen To This Song, a meditation on a night she spent alone in the annex where Anne Frank, writer of the famous diary, and her family hid from the Nazis between 1942-1944. Lafon uses her unique experience to find the person at the heart of the venerated and exploited myth.

Lola Lafon discusses her vision of Anne Frank with Maurice Samuels, author of Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair.

Many Festival events are filmed and recorded for archival and research purposes, and occasionally for further distribution, such as promotional opportunities, on our website, and for network television. The films might sometimes include recognizable shots of members of the audience and/or interviews with patrons before or after the live events. Purchase of this ticket implies your permission to be filmed.

Professor and Pulitzer-Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen joins us to discuss his latest essay collection. Originally delivered as the prestigious Norton Lectures, To Save and to Destroy is a personal and sweeping meditation on the outsider in literary history and the role of the writer in the world at large. The essays proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean in literary writing?

Viet Thanh Nguyen will be in conversation with journalist and cultural critic Bilal Qureshi.

Many Festival events are filmed and recorded for archival and research purposes, and occasionally for further distribution, such as promotional opportunities, on our website, and for network television. The films might sometimes include recognizable shots of members of the audience and/or interviews with patrons before or after the live events. Purchase of this ticket implies your permission to be filmed.

2025 BOOKER PRIZE WINNER 

Author of All That Man Is, longlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize, David Szalay discusses Flesh, a propulsive, hypnotic novel by the “uncommonly gifted” writer (The New York Times). Fifteen-year old István lives in a quiet complex in Hungary, but his life begins to spiral out of control as he begins a clandestine relationship with a married woman close to his mother’s age. Szalay traces the history of a perpetual outsider as he navigates a rags to riches journey from boyhood in Hungary to wealth and power in London—asking the questions what makes life worth living, and what breaks it.

Many Festival events are filmed and recorded for archival and research purposes, and occasionally for further distribution, such as promotional opportunities, on our website, and for network television. The films might sometimes include recognizable shots of members of the audience and/or interviews with patrons before or after the live events. Purchase of this ticket implies your permission to be filmed.