London closes its festival by questioning censorship, care and AI

The London Literature Festival enters its final weekend at the Southbank Centre with three questions about writing’s future. On Saturday 31 October, Service95 and English PEN confront threats to free expression in Censorship Live!, combining testimony, readings and expert discussion. That evening Caleb Azumah Nelson and Tomasz Jedrowski take part in Rewriting Male Tenderness, a conversation about masculinity, vulnerability and care. On Sunday 1 November, novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo delivers AI-esque, a lecture on creating fiction in the age of artificial intelligence; the closing programme also features Hanif Kureishi in conversation with Emma Barnett. London’s programme does not treat literature as an isolated object: it uses books and writers to examine political pressure, technological change and new ways of narrating intimacy.