Ilkley Literature Festival is calling all foodies to sink their teeth into juicy conversations at a series of food and drink author events.

Part of its 100-strong event line up across 17 days, from 6 – 22 October, the festival welcomes some of the country’s leading writers on the theme, Food for Thought.

Audiences can delve into the world of cheese, devour stories set around the kitchen table and delight with prosecco at a proof party.

Columnist and restaurant critic Grace Dent offers an hour of hilarious and honest stories about comfort eating. John Murray Press is hosting a Proof Party with prosecco at Ilkley Playhouse. Audiences will receive three debut fiction novels, a tote bag, and glass of prosecco to sip as they listen to the three emerging authors.

Cheese lovers can sample Emma Young’s The Cheese Wheel. The cheese specialist will teach you how to choose, taste and pair cheese, promising your cheese knowledge will have matured by the end of the night. The renowned chef and The Sunday Times best-selling author Sabrina Ghayour heads to Ilkley to share recipes from her brand-new cookbook, Flavour.

For fiction lovers, future literary giants, Bryan Washington – winner of the 2020 International Dylan Thomas Prize for Memorial – and C Pam Zhang – author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, one of Barack Obama’s favourite reads in 2020 – are coming to Ilkley to discuss the complex relationship between food and love in their latest novels.

Launched in 1973 by the poet W.H Auden, the north’s oldest literary festival welcomes a host of poets, novelists, biographers, and journalists to the spa town this autumn.

Headline acts include Clare Balding, Jeanette Winterson, Anton Du Beke, Simon Armitage, Jacqueline Wilson, Gyles Brandreth and Monica Ali. For full details of authors and their talks visit

ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk Box Office: 01943 816714.