Sarah Hall: Burning Snowflake - The Faber Lecture 2026

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Award-winning author Sarah Hall delivers the 2026 Faber Lecture: Burning Snowflake.

The natural world is burning. Time is running out. You know the story. So what possible role could something as flimsy as fiction play?

From the pioneering pen of a continually visionary writer, Burning Snowflake is a fierce and rallying cry – to shrug off restrictions and imagine radically. It’s also a clarion call to other writers, artists and readers for the literary imagination as a vital weapon in the fight for climate survival.

Sarah Hall says: ‘I’m thrilled to be writing and delivering this year’s Faber Lecture. It’s an opportunity to explore subjects close to my heart – the nature of writing and the writing of nature. I’ve spent more than 25 years working at that intersection. Now, huge challenges to both the environment and literature mean fiction faces a reckoning. This lecture is about the power of prose to trespass, to disrupt and to rebel, offering narratives and visions that undermine and overcome adverse systems, perhaps even create solution stories.’

Join us for this intimate reading and inaugural premiere of Sarah’s Faber Lecture in the atmospheric Manchester Museum.

Sarah Hall is the award-winning author of seven novels and three short-story collections. Notably, she is the only author to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice – first in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’ and again in 2020 with ‘The Grotesques.’ Her 2025 novel Helm was selected as a Book of the Year by The Observer, New Statesman, Financial Times and BBC amongst others. Born in Cumbria, Sarah is known for her evocative and wild fiction about place, nature and people.

Presented in partnership with Faber Members, Centre for New Writing, Creative Manchester and Manchester Museum.

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