Sunday 25 September

Flavoursome Stories
With Niki Segnit

12 noon • Tickets: £9 (£8 Students)
Niki Segnit's The Flavour Thesaurus is a compendium of short and pithy stories revolving around 99 characters and their liaisons - all common flavours. If you have ever wondered which two flavours are like dancing partners in a salsa, which fruits lead double lives, why coriander and lime are like backing tracks - let alone how eating a madeleine biscuit triggered the creation of one of the greatest literary works of all time - all will be revealed. Full of tasty anecdotes and quirky combos, The Flavour Thesaurus is an inventory of human inspiration.

Life Stories
Rachel Cusk, Janice Galloway and Colin Grant

2pm • Tickets: £9 (£8 Students)
Short stories come in many shapes and forms, including non-fiction. Rachel Cusk and Janice Galloway published essays, based on their own lives, in the 'F' (for feminism) issue of Granta and Colin Grant has contributed a comic memoir for a forthcoming edition. Rachel Cusk describes her current divorce and family breakdown, Janice Galloway the conflicting mores of her upbringing and Colin Grant evokes his Jamaican family life in 60s London. They discuss the creative compulsion to write about their own experiences with Sigrid Rausing, Publisher of Granta.

The Crème de la Crème
With Ali Smith

4pm • Tickets: £9 (£8 Students)
Best known for her novels - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, Memento Mori - Muriel Spark's spare prose also lent itself to short fiction. Not surprisingly, Ali Smith, one of our most original writers, is drawn to Spark's work. They share a satirical sense of humour and an ability to subvert expectations.
Ali Smith's new novel is There but for the. She has published several story collections and has twice been short listed for the Booker Prize. She will read a Muriel Spark story.

Spoilers and Imperfectionists
With Annalena McAfee and Tom Rachman

6pm • £9 (£8 Students)
Why is the world of journalism such a ripe target for satire? Annalena McAfee's The Spoiler is a tragi-comic novel about two female journalists, one a frontline reporter, the other a features writer, both about to become obsolete in the digital age. Tom Rachman's best selling The Imperfectionists, a funny and poignant collection of stories, revolves around the demise of a newspaper and the characters who depend on it. Both writers are insiders. Annalena McAfee is a long-standing journalist and founder of the Guardian Review; Tom Rachman a former foreign correspondent and International Herald Tribute editor.

One Thousand and One Nights
Hanan Al-Shaykh and Shahidha Bari

8pm • £9 (£8 Students)
Erotic, brutal, witty, poetic - and definitely not intended for children, One Thousand and One Nights are never ending stories told by the young Shahrazad under sentence of death to King Shahrayar. Written in Arabic from tales gathered in India, Persia and the Arab empire, these mesmerising stories, translated by novelist Hanan Al-Shaykh, provide the script for a new dramatisation of the epic. She discusses their significance in traditional Islamic culture and their contemporary relevance with Shahidha Bari, a winner of the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, whose special interest is The Arabian Nights.