The London Library Lit Fest is taking place from Thursday 27 April – Sunday 30 April 2023.
Open to everyone, The London Library Lit Fest will bring together leading figures from the literary world for an eclectic, inspiring and thought-provoking long weekend of conversation, performance, art and music exploring themes of collections, collecting and collectives. Events include creative workshops, fascinating panel discussions, and the first ever performance of Sylvia Pankhurst’s formidable long-lost play Between Two Fires.
Events will be held in the Library’s famous Reading Room across the evenings of Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and all day on Sunday. Events will be livestreamed, opening the Library to all.
The Programme
Thursday
Explore portraits of women writers in an exhibition by South African born, UK-based artist, Susanne du Toit. The exhibition launch, in which this complete series of works is shown for the first time and throughout the festival, is followed by a very special salon with Susanne and some of her illustrious sitters including Juliet Jacques, Dreda Say Mitchell and Sacha Llewellyn and Lara Feigel.
Friday
Don’t miss an electrifying evening of poetry, performance, dance and music to honour TS Eliot's epic poem, The Waste Land and the city it inhabits. Featuring poets Ben Okri, Jay Bernard, Will Harris, Sophie Herxheimer, Daljit Nagra, Richard Scott and Hannah Sullivan, singer songwriter Polly Paulusma and dancer Charlotte Jarvis. An exhibition of sculptures by Jacqueline Nicholls, which grapple with The Waste Land, will be hidden among the Library’s stacks and can also be enjoyed throughout the festival.
Saturday
Discover Between Two Fires, the powerful long-lost play that Sylvia Pankhurst wrote in solitary confinement in HMP Holloway with a contraband pencil. Performed for the first time in a rehearsed reading directed by Roxana Silbert, it will be followed by a panel discussion with Pankhurst’s biographer Rachel Holmes; her granddaughter activist Helen Pankhurst; playwright Sonali Bhattacharyya and London Library archivist Nathalie Belkin. The cast are yet to be announced.
Two inspiring writing workshops will run in partnership with Arvon, the national creative writing charity, across Saturday and Sunday. Artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer will lead a workshop on found and collage poetry using the Library’s collection and novelist Marcel Theroux will lead a workshop on writing politics into fiction. Workshops are in-person only.
Sunday
We kick off Sunday with a showcase of amazing talent from some former participants on our prestigious Emerging Writers Programme. Later in the day we’ll take a fascinating look at anthologies, encyclopaedias and indexes with Simon Garfield, Dennis Duncan, Clare Bucknell and Rishi Dastidar, dissecting the cultural, social and political history of information collation in the Age of Google. Meanwhile, flipping the patriarchy on its head in their most recent books, activist and writer, Yassmin Abdel-Magied brings together Carole Hailey and Ayisha Malik to explore gender, silence and revolution.
And rounding off this year’s Lit Fest, five speakers delve into the Library's idiosyncratic Science and Miscellaneous section to celebrate the Library’s weird and wild heart in a lively event in partnership with 5x15, including poet and playwright Inua Ellams on 'Music', bestselling author Kate Summerscale on 'Fear', award-winning psychotherapist Maxine Mei-Fung Chung on 'Sex' (and desire), film critic Danny Leigh on 'Typewriters' and legendary journalist and biographer Philip Norman on 'Press'.
Please note that the lockers will not be available throughout the festival. Ticketholders are advised to not bring large bags.
The London Library LitFest is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and by Fondation Jan Michalski.
