Dreams for Lammas: a gala of new local writing
Thursday 1 August 2024, Zoom, 7.00pm - 8.00pm; £3/£2
Some call it Lammas. Some call it Lughnasadh, Lughnasa or Lúnasa. Whatever your culture, in the Northern Hemisphere, early August has traditionally been a time when the start of harvest season is celebrated.
Our third gala of local writing welcomes your poems and short stories that explore this broad theme.
Coming up online!
The Age of the Algorithm: Julia Bell with Philip Seargeant
Monday 17 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan
Writer and creative writing lecturer Julia Bell talks to the OU’s Philip Seargeant about how the implementation of AI impacts writers’ freedom of expression, covering topics from augmented writing applications’ influence on style and content to ways that techno-capitalism exploits and monetises human behaviour.
Literature and Offence: Mark Rosenblatt with Monika Smialkowska
Monday 10 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan
Is theatre still the ideal venue for exploring challenging, complex and even potentially offensive topics? Dr Monika Smialkowska discusses these issues with Mark Rosenblatt, author of the new play Giant, a fictionalised account of the circumstances leading up to an interview that Roald Dahl gave in which he expressed a series of explicitly antisemitic opinions.
Historical Cancel Culture: Charlotte Gordon with Jupiter Jones
Monday 24 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan
Charlotte Gordon, author of Radical Outlaws, talks to Jupiter Jones about the eighteenth-century writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and how, after her untimely death, Wollstonecraft was effectively ‘cancelled’, due largely to the publication of a scandalous tell-all memoir.
Translation and Censorship: Sawad Hussain/Monica Cure w Daria Chernysheva
Monday 31 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan
In this event, we explore literature in translation with a specific focus on censorship and free speech through the lens of two novels that both address these concerns: Liliana Corobca’s The Censor’s Notebook and Bothayna al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library.
Dreams for Beltane: celebrating the First of May
Thursday 1 May 2025, Zoom, 7.00pm - 8.00pm; £3/£2 (selected writers enter free)
Whether you celebrate ancient pagan ritual, International Labour Day or any of the other anniversaries that 1 May marks, submit your poetry, flash fiction or creative non-fiction for our online event, Dreams for Beltane. Entries close on 12 April 2025.