How to Survive Yourself: Life, Literature and Lies with DBC Pierre
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When one icon steps aside, another steps in. Following Rupert Everett’s sad withdrawal due to a close personal bereavement (and promise that he will return in the new year), we are thrilled to welcome the Booker Prize-winning author DBC Pierre to headline Friday night at the Folkestone Book Festival.
Like Everett, Pierre is a magnetic storyteller — audacious, wickedly funny and unafraid to mine chaos for truth. But while Everett’s memoirs explore fame and identity through performance, Pierre dissects the masks we wear in life and literature: the lies we tell ourselves, and what it takes to survive them.
In How to Survive Yourself, Pierre joins journalist and writer Lara Johnson-Wheeler for an evening of confessions, creative rebellion and dangerous ideas. Expect sharp, darkly comic reflections on his extraordinary life — from scandal and downfall to literary redemption — and what it means to live on the edge of respectability.
Together, they’ll explore the wild frontiers of writing today: art versus morality, truth versus invention, and the eternal pull between destruction and creation. Pierre’s fascination with unreliable narrators, social absurdity and hypocrisy has made him one of modern literature’s great outsiders — and one of its most entertaining truth-tellers.
The evening opens with anonymous audience confessions projected onscreen — small truths, secrets and lies sent in advance — setting the mood for an hour that promises provocation, laughter and unfiltered honesty. It will close with Pierre’s Five Rules for Survival — a personal, witty and philosophical guide to staying human amid chaos.
A rare appearance by a Booker Prize winner, this is DBC Pierre unplugged: bold, brilliant and utterly unpredictable.