The Full LIFI26 Line-Up Is Here, and Louis Theroux Is Coming to Leeds

Some festivals build slowly. Ours has been building towards a moment like this for six years, and it has arrived. Louis Theroux is coming to Leeds.

The sixth edition of Leeds International Festival of Ideas runs from 6 to 10 October 2026 at Leeds Playhouse, and the full programme is now confirmed. Twelve events across five days, with a line-up that reads like a who’s who of the people shaping the national conversation: Theroux, Tim Minchin, Elizabeth Day, Chris Packham CBE, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Vicky Pattison, Roman Kemp, James O’Brien, Megan McKenna and more.

As Festival Director Martin Dickson puts it, this is a programme with serious depth beyond the headline. LIFI has always been about bringing the brightest minds to Leeds and giving the city a stage that punches above its weight. LIFI26 does exactly that.

Theroux opens the festival on Tuesday 6 October with an intimate fireside chat on the Quarry stage. Four decades into a career that has redefined long-form broadcasting, he has built his reputation on the quiet, stubborn act of paying attention. Far-right militias, Scientologists, the famous, the broken and the misunderstood. Expect a conversation about curiosity, conviction, and the stories we tell ourselves and each other.

From there the week opens out. On Wednesday, Amy Irons hosts How Do We Talk About Suicide?, a panel built around conversation rather than cause, asking how media, mates and masculinity shape the way we talk, or do not, about one of society’s hardest subjects. The same evening, Elizabeth Day brings her chart-topping thinking on resilience and self-limiting beliefs to the Quarry in Failure Is An Option, a fireside chat that has sold out everywhere from the London Palladium to Sydney Opera House.

Thursday belongs to two very different kinds of resilience. Dame Evelyn Glennie, the double GRAMMY-winning percussionist who has been profoundly deaf since childhood, shares a journey that redefines the sound of success in Strength Beyond The Silence. Later, Chris Packham CBE asks why the environment has slipped off the political agenda in The Planet Hasn’t Stopped Burning, and what it will take to put it back.

Friday goes head to head with modern life. Joe Tidy hosts Is It Time To Switch Off Social Media?, while Miranda Sawyer leads What Did The 90s Really Do To Us?, a deep dive into Britpop, Blair, the birth of the internet and the cultural fallout we are still living with.

Saturday closes the festival in style. Are Kids Still Part Of The Plan? opens the day with Laura Hamilton, before Samira Ahmed hosts We All Belong Here, Don’t We?, an unflinching conversation about belonging in a fractured Britain. And then Tim Minchin brings the curtain down with Creativity Among The Chaos, a career-spanning conversation taking in Matilda the Musical, three decades of songwriting, and his refreshingly clear-eyed views on living a creative life.

Tickets

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