Literary Leicester 2025 Podcasts

 

You can now listen to podcasts of the brilliant events at Literary Leicester Festival 2025 here.

These include:

• The Creative Writing Student Showcase 2025 here. Speakers included Sonya Hundal, Anna Walsh, Joe Bedford, Aidan Trulove, Laura Besley, Olivia Peachey, Kimaya Patil, Cate Morris, Shauna Strathmann, Daneil Hibberd, Nina Walker, Aarini Mehta, Sandra Shaji, Dave Clarke. 
• The "Bullying, School and Power" event, with Morag Edwards, James Scudamore and Jonathan Taylor, here. 
• The "Voices from the Other Side of Hope" event here. 
• Kit de Waal on The Best of Everything here. 
• "The Air We Breathe: How to Write about Our Air and Our Future" event here. 

And there are many others!

Creative Writing Student Showcase 2024: The Recording

 

As many of you will know, during this year's amazing Literary Leicester Festival, we ran our third annual Creative Writing Student Showcase on the evening of Wednesday 20 March 2024. It was a wonderful event, featuring brilliant readings from BA, MA, PhD Creative Writing students and graduates, including Beth Gaylard, Grace Klemperer, Hannah Mitchell, Lisa Williams, Kathy Hoyle, Jack Peachey, Laurie Cusack, Daneil Hibberd, Tracey Foster, Rob Reeves, Isobel Copley, Alexander Osani, Oleksandra Korshunova and Laura Besley. Thank you to everyone involved: the speakers, the organisers and the fantastically supportive audience. 

You can now listen to a recording of the Creative Writing Student Showcase event on Literary Leicester's podcast channel here. 

Creative Writing Student Showcase 2022

 

On Wednesday 23 March 2022, as part of Literary Leicester, we ran our first ever Creative Writing Student Showcase event in Attenborough Arts Centre, University of Leicester. The event was sold out, and featured fiction, poetry, prose and scripts from students across all our courses and programmes: BA, MA and PhD. The event was a wonderful opportunity to celebrate some of the brilliant work done by University of Leicester Creative Writing students, past and present, and was a great success. 

Students who performed at the event were: Joe Bedford, Laura Besley, Isobel Copley, Nina Walker, Lisa Williams, Tracey Foster (who read her recently-published poem "Second-Best Jewellery Box"), Laurie Cusack, Hannah Mitchell (who read her award-winning story, "Happy Birthday, Eileen"), Beth Gaylard and Cathi Rae.

Congratulations and thanks to everyone who was involved!

Middleway Words: The Programme

We recently announced news of a new book festival based in the Midlands, Middleway Words, which will take place from the 5th to 11th September 2021. You can see the original announcement and information here. This is an online festival of books and literature across the Midlands, aimed at promoting authors and books in the region. There will be events, talks, workshops, readings and interviews, and all of it is free. 

You can now register for free tickets for the festival on Eventbrite here. 

You can download the programme for the festival on the Eventbrite site, or directly here. 

On Friday 10th September at 4pm, the festival includes a conversation between novelist Kerry Hadley-Pryce and Jonathan Taylor of the University of Leicester. All are welcome, and the event, like all others in the festival, is free. 

Middleway Words: Announcing New Book Festival in the Midlands

A new online Midlands Book Festival is to be established to celebrate the large number of writers in the region – and to inspire a new generation to express their creativity.

Organised by members of the Society of Authors, Middleway Words will feature five days of free online events between September 5-11, bringing together readers and writers to discuss and discover many great books, covering a broad range of genres, from the Midlands.

"We have a long and proud tradition of great writing in the Midlands," says Ignaty Dyakov-Richmond, a co-chair of Society of Authors Warwickshire, and co-founder of the Festival, "and there are so many excellent writers in the region who readers would love if only they were introduced to their work. With Middleway Words, we aim to bring them together. We are formulating an exciting programme of events which will have something for everyone who loves books. Not only will Middleway Words promote those who are already creating great work, we want it to provide helpful advice to inspire others to write.”

The Festival will feature five days of events, interviews and videos which will be available to view live for free on the Festival’s YouTube channel. 

It will begin on Sunday, September 5, with author-led panel discussion on how a book is born. Sessions aimed at adults and children on how to write fiction and poetry to appeal to readers of all ages will follow. The closing panel, on Saturday, September 11, aims to introduce different types of writing, including script, translation, education and theatre narrative. 

In between, there will be two or three sessions a day, in which regional authors will talk and answer questions about their books and the writing process. There may also be talks from others in the book business, including a literary agent, a publisher, a book-seller and a librarian.

Short videos from other authors speaking about their books will be aired prior to and during the Festival, giving readers plenty of chance to add new names to their reading list.

For more details about Middleway Festival, you can email middlewaywords@gmail.com, and see: 

twitter.com/middlewaywords

and https://www.facebook.com/middlewaywords/

A Day at Lowdham Book Festival, by Rosalind Rustom

The Lowdham Book Festival is a yearly event that takes place in the village of Lowdham just outside Nottingham, and as of 2018 has been running for nineteen years. This year, the event took place from Tuesday 19th to Saturday 30th June, and I travelled to Lowdham to attend the last day of the festival.

The locations for the talks were spread around Lowdham, the main hub of the festival being in the village hall. Here, there was the opportunity to buy books at a collection of stalls which showcased the work of authors talking at the festival, as well as tables to sit and enjoy food from the café. In the gardens outside the hall, there were marquees for the talks as well as areas for further book stalls.

I started my day by attending a talk titled ‘New Irish Writing’, which was given by Deirdre O’Bryne, a lecturer at Loughborough University and an expert in Irish literature. She discussed the new voices in Irish writing and the use of experimentation in terms of form and content. O’Byrne focused on the work of authors such as Louise O’Neill, Sara Baume, Sally Rooney and Eimear McBride, and led an entertaining and stimulating discussion concerning the topic of identity in Irish literature. 

Next, I attended 'The Shoestring Poetry Hour,' which was led by poetry publisher John Lucas and showcased the work of Roy Marshall and Jonathan Taylor. Roy Marshall gave a reading of a selection of his new and older poems, and explained that some were inspired from his work within hospitals in Leicester. Thus, many contained themes of illness and mortality, and Marshall’s readings gave the poems an enhanced harrowing undertone. Following this, Jonathan Taylor read a selection of poems from his new collection Cassandra Complex. Jonathan read a mixture of amusing as well as darker poems, which the audience enjoyed and resonated with them.

Lastly, I attended a talk titled ‘Crime fiction,’ which was led by Roz Watkins following the publication of her debut crime novel Devil’s Dice. Watkins briefly spoke about the novel and the inspiration of the Peak District in the setting for the novel, but more focused her talk on her personal struggles and obsessions with writing what she saw as a ‘publishable book,’ detailing her journey into the publishing world. She discussed her insecurities in her writing,  tackling negative reviews, and the life of writing as a job. This made for a very interesting and personal talk, and resonated with the audience, leading to many further questions that were posed during the Q&A section of the event. 

I had a lovely day at Lowdham Book Festival and thoroughly enjoyed the variety of talks that took place over the day. The event was well organised and a friendly atmosphere was clear across the festival, due to the passionate and engaged audience members as well as the many authors who took time to give talks or showcase their work. 


About the author
Rosalind Rustom is a recent graduate from the University of Leicester with a degree in English and American Studies, with a particular interest in fantasy fiction.

We All Belong, by Rosalind Adam

By Rosalind Adam

The programme for this year’s ArtBeat Leicester Festival was packed with activities. They ranged from Israeli dancing to philosophy in the pub to a Gurdwara visit with curry lunch. I ticked off the most appealing events but I knew that it would be impossible to attend them all. I was going to have to be selective. 

The festival theme was 'We All Belong' and this was the topic for this year’s ArtBeat poetry competition. I submitted two poems and fully intended to turn up to the prize-giving event but, as I said, it was a busy week. Did I mention the Lindy Hop or the Indian Folk Dancing or the Maypole Dance Workshop? It was a true test of stamina. 

Last Tuesday, with all thoughts of Artbeat behind me, I attended my regular poetry group meeting. I settled down to a morning of workshopping, only to find myself the centre of attention. The Festival organiser had chosen that morning to present me with a certificate, or to be more precise two certificates. To my embarrassment I’d scooped not only 1st but also 4th place in the 'We All Belong' poetry competition. 

There is a lesson to be learnt here. If you enter a competition, make sure to give top priority to attending the prize-giving event, no matter how busy your week is. Here (below) is the poem that won first prize:



The Top Class 

Winner of the Artbeat Leicester ‘We All Belong’ Poetry Competition, 2017


It was our morning mantra: 
Linda. Here, Miss. Andrew. Here, Miss. 
Lee. He’s not here, Miss, and we knew
the Board Man would be on his way.
He’d not go round the back like us.
He’d knock on Lee’s front door 
while Lee hid because that’s what you did 
when The Board Man called.

After the register we all lined up
for assembly in the hall. 
Cross-legged by the back wall 
we flicked paper pellets and sang
about Jerusalem being builded here 
in our green and pleasant land 
which was really grey and full of soot 
from the factory down the road.

In class we sat at desks with lids,
did handwriting with pens that had spiky nibs
and pounds, shillings, pence sums on squared-paper.
We longed for Miss to say, playtime,
and give out bottles of milk from the metal crate. 
In the playground we skipped with the long rope, 
and we chose the song, jelly on the plate, 
because we were the top class. 

We stayed out for PE, for the fresh air,
and spun hoops round our waists, 
round our necks when Miss wasn’t there, 
but games on Friday was the best, 
going to the field, clambering onto the bus, 
racing for the back seat and us all singing
Ten Green Bottles and falling about laughing
because we always got the numbers wrong.

Soon we’d sit the 11 plus test 
and they’d split us up for ever.
We’d be sent to the sec mod down the road
or the big grammar school in town
where we’d be streamed and given homework,
where we’d have to read stuff by Shakespeare, 
do logarithms with a book full of numbers
but for now we were the top class.



Rosalind Adam is a writer and student on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. Her blog: http://rosalindadam.blogspot.co.uk/