This year’s Guernsey Literary Festival, one of the Channel Islands’ biggest annual celebrations of the arts, has much on offer for the business community this year and there are still tickets available.

The programme, which runs from 25 April to 4 May, has more than 50 public events, most featuring both international and local writers and speakers, covering a wide range of subjects including entertainment, music, art, food, fiction, poetry, history, politics and sport as well as debates on artificial intelligence and smart phones and a gardeners’ question time.

The Festival opens with two speakers who come under the business/politics/current affairs umbrella.

Patrick Grant is well known to many as a presenter and judge on the BBC’s Great British Sewing Bee – a position he holds not only because he is an excellent communicator but also a highly respected fashion designer. His talk, on Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish - How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier, is on Friday 25 April at 1pm at St James and is supported by the Guernsey Chamber of Commerce.

Also on Friday 25 April at St James – at 8pm – is human rights campaigner Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, who will be talking about her book Human Rights - The Case for the Defence, a powerful and urgent explanation and vindication of our human rights and freedoms as seen by Shami, a leading human rights lawyer and parliamentarian. This talk is supported by the Victor Hugo Centre.

Andrew Likierman, a former dean of the London Business School and director of the Bank of England, explains how to improve your judgement, from becoming a better decision-maker to identifying judgement in others - revealing extraordinary opportunities for improvement and success at both the personal and organisational level. His talk, Judgement at Work - Making Better Choices is on Wednesday 30 April at 1pm at Les Cotils and is sponsored by the NED Forum.

With a background in the British Diplomatic Service and practical insights from conflict zones, Julian Fisher will talk about his book Think Like a Spy - Master the Art of Influence and Build Life-Changing Alliances on Thursday 1 May at 1pm at Les Cotils. His compelling book reveals nine secret skills to enhance, influence and achieve personal and professional goals. Julian empowers everyone to think like a spy and use that thinking to transform their lives. Sponsored by Dorey Financial Modelling.

Environmental expert Mike Berners-Lee asks an important question in his talk A Climate of Truth - Why We Need It and How to Get It: we have the technology we need for a cleaner and healthier future, so why are we still accelerating into a polycrisis of environmental and social strife? He gets right under the skin of our failures so far, to uncover what it will take to do better at last. Mike’s talk is on Thursday 1 May at 6pm and is sponsored by BWCI Group

In Just Earth - How a Fairer World will Save the Planet, on Friday 2 May at 1pm at St Pierre Park Hotel, Tony Juniper CBE argues that we cannot fight the climate and nature crises without addressing the widening gap between the rich and poor. Green technologies cannot change things on their own, we must also break the traps set by inequalities. Tony is a former director of Friends of the Earth and now chair of the UK government’s official conservation agency Natural England. His previous books include Harmony, which was co-authored with King Charles III. His talk is sponsored by Mourant.

Political journalist Anushka Asthana takes us behind the scenes of the 2024 general election campaign in Taken as Red - How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party. This talk is on Tuesday 29 April at 6pm at St Pierre Park Hotel. Anushka’s gripping account provides an unprecedented insider’s perspective on the inner workings of Keir Starmer’s Labour and Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, and the events of this high-stakes electoral contest as it unfolded.

John Sweeney’s book Murder in the Gulag is particularly important at this moment when every move Russia makes has repercussions on the rest of the world. In his talk, on Saturday 3 May at 11am at St Pierre Park, John will reiterate the book’s warning: if the West fails to stand up more forcefully to Putin, we are in danger not just of betraying Ukraine, but our own security too. Sweeney argues that Alexei Navalny made a fatal mistake returning to Russia after his poisoning, betting that Vladimir Putin wouldn’t kill him. But with the fortunes of war slowly turning in Russia’s favour, Navalny lost that bet. This talk is supported by The Times Literary Supplement.

Experienced journalist and writer Jon Sopel moved home to the UK after eight years of political reporting in the US and found his home country to be a very different place post-Brexit from the one he’d left. His observations led to his book Strangeland - How Britain Stopped Making Sense , the subject of his talk on Friday 2 May at 7:30pm at St James. His talk will be chaired by BBC Radio 4’s Sarah Montague.

The Festival’s popular Business Breakfast, with Parmy Olson, on Supremacy - AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World, held at the OGH Hotel on Friday 2 May and sponsored by Butterfield, has already been sold out.