Corfu

Then, on a whim, I accepted an invitation to play cricket in Corfu.

I knew little about the island at the time – not about its strategic history, nor how that position had shaped a culture that is at once Greek, Venetian and British. I hadn’t yet walked the Liston, the elegant colonnaded arcade that might be Venice or Trieste, Bologna or Perugia were it not for the cricket pitch laid out in front of it. The pitch is surrounded by a car park; its groundsmen battle heat, salt spray, digging children and fouling dogs. Yet it remains the only cricket pitch in the world I know that’s set within a Unesco world heritage site. Taking guard there, you look up to the Old Fortress for solidity, and to the Palace of St Michael and St George for elegance and flair.

I went out with the Lord’s Taverners, a UK sports charity team. We were a motley bunch: a couple of former internationals – Andy Caddick and Chris Cowdrey – some actors, entertainers and a handful of writers, including me. The Corfiots, it turned out, were very good at cricket. The Greek national team is drawn almost entirely from the island. We were soundly beaten, then consoled by warmth, generosity and a run of excellent dinners in the Old Town.

It was over one of those dinners – at the Pergola – that I met Nikos Louvros and his wife, Annabelle, our hosts and the founders of Cricket Corfu. Nikos was rambunctiously Greek, full of wild energy; Annabelle was English in that particular way that falls deeply for Greece and builds a life around it. I recognised the impulse. By the end of the meal of lamb, ouzo and excellent local wine, we had planned our future together: we would launch a literary festival.

Over the subsequent years, that vision has taken glorious shape. Corfu literary festival began modestly: at our first, in 2017, there were as many speakers on stage as there were people in the audience. I remember Nikos’s hope, irritation and finally, characteristically, laughter as invited guests failed to show up. But there was never any sense it would stop. With Nikos beside you, everything seemed possible.

Slowly, buoyed by local support, the festival grew into something far larger than we had imagined. We’ve had Stephen Fry and Sebastian Faulks, Bettany Hughes and Natalie Haynes, Matt Haig and Tom Holland. They came and spoke, they stayed at the heavenly Kontokali Bay hotel, or in the villas and apartments of Ionian Estates, and they fell in love with Corfu as I had. Many have come back to speak several times.

Nikos lived for this – for showing others the beauty and drama of the island on which he was born, then left and returned to. He is gone now, but the festival endures. This September, it will return, larger and more magical than ever, with Homer’s Odyssey at its heart – a fitting subject for an island where the mythic and the everyday still fold into each other with ease.

This is what I learned from Nikos, and from Corfu, over the years: swim early, before the day warms and when the water still has a faint bite. Swim after lunch, when the sea feels silky. Swim at dusk, when the surface holds the day’s heat and the light becomes thick and slow. Corfu is large enough and varied enough that you can build an entire itinerary around water and never feel you are repeating yourself.

On the west coast, Myrtiotissa remains the beach that feels closest to a private miracle. Set in a steep green cradle, it is an initiation to reach it. Not unreasonably, Durrell called it “perhaps the most beautiful beach in the world”.

Paleokastritsa possesses a different kind of beauty. The monastery above the bay looks down over a scatter of coves where the water is so clear you can see the rocks far below, like a second landscape suspended in blue.

Then there is the north-east, which has calmer waters, protected coves, a more intimate coastline. Agni Bay is a gentle curve of shoreline made for long lunches. Agni Taverna sits close enough to the water that you can leave your table, swim and return still tasting salt. Eat fish, eat simply, let time loosen its grip. If you can, arrive by boat: the north-east coast has a tradition of taking water taxis between bays, and there is something unmistakably Corfiot about stepping straight from deck to lunch.

A surprise – especially if your image of Greek islands is Cycladic sparseness – is how green Corfu is. The interior rises and folds like a small country. Olive groves run for miles; cypresses spike the skyline. Drive up into the villages above Paleokastritsa and you reach Lakones, perched high enough to make the island feel suddenly vast. At Boulis, the food is good, but it’s the terrace view you come for, the sense of stepping straight into the blue horizon.

Corfu’s cuisine is not what you usually think of as Greek: shaped by Venetian influence, by centuries of contact with Italy and by produce from the island’s land and sea. Pastitsada is a beef stew with pasta; sofrito is beef or veal slices braised in a sauce of white wine, vinegar, garlic and parsley; bourdeto is fish stew.

In Corfu Town, make time for a night at Salto – contemporary but grounded, with excellent ingredients and a superb wine list. Then go for ice-cream at Papagiorgios. Walk the Old Town with a cone in hand, the stone still warm, and you feel part of a long tradition of summer nights.

In 2020, in a brief, improbable lull between Covid lockdowns, we held the festival as if it were an act of defiance against the gods. The world was half closed; plans changed by the hour. Yet, for a few days, the island opened its arms and let us in. Chairs were spaced out, masks slipped on and off, hand sanitisers were perched on every table – and still there was laughter, ideas, beauty. Things that made us feel human.

One morning, Nikos appeared with a boat. He had a gift for that – arriving as if from nowhere, already halfway into the next idea. “Come,” he said. A dozen of us climbed aboard and pulled away from the town, leaving behind the anxious news cycle and the low-level fear of that year. We ran along the north-east coast, cutting the engine in inlets you would never find from land: slivers of shingle, limestone shelves, beaches no bigger than sofas. Each time we stopped, we swam as if trying to slough the year off our skin. I felt like freedom, something snatched from darkness.

That was the last festival Nikos attended. He died of Covid the following January – on my birthday.

When I think of Nikos now, I think of that day on the water: of joy under pressure, of how precious it becomes. When he died, the island felt altered – not less beautiful, but more charged, as if the light carried grief in waves. Yet, Corfu also teaches something: that love for a place can outlive the person who brought you there, and become a way of honouring them.

I have tried to do that in my own way, too. My novel A Stranger in Corfu is dedicated to Nikos. It grew out of this island – its layered past, its atmosphere of secrecy and hospitality, the sense that stories cling to the land. The novel is, at heart, a love letter: an attempt to pay proper attention to a place that has given me more than I can easily name.

Go to Corfu and do not hurry. Swim often. Drive into the hills. Eat as if time were a gift. Let the island reveal itself at its own pace – slowly, then all at once.

And if, one day, someone appears with a boat and an idea, say yes.

A Stranger in Corfu by Alex Preston is published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. The 2026 Corfu literary festival runs from 21-27 September