Past Events

The superb and stupendous Sarah Hall hardly needs an introduction - she's won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award, a Lakeland Book of the Year prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, the Portico Prize for Fiction, been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, longlisted for the Orange Prize, shortlisted for…

A creative exploration / masterclass / presentation / seminar / informal debate about the sonnet form: its rules and restrictions, the rhythm and rhyme, quatrains, iambic pentameters, voltas and couplets that leave readers either in awe or pulling their hair out.

When reading or chatting about poetry, we tend to forget about form - the very basic physical structure of the words on the page. So in this workshop, we’ll be slowing right down, and becoming poetry archaeologists, starting at the start: discussing just the first few things we encounter when reading a poem: spacial architecture, lineation, and syntax.

An evening of Animal Stories from Many Cultures at Aylsham Town Hall, told by Hugh Lupton in aid of ‘The Pilgrimage of the Animals’. With a pop-up bookshop by The Book Hive and refreshments provided by North Norfolk XR.

Join us at 6pm on 26th February for a conversation between cartoonists Kate Charlesworth and David Shenton for LGBT History Month. Kate Charlesworth is a cartoonist and author of Sensible Footwear (2019). A graphic history and personal account of LGBTQ+ life in Britain since the 1950s, Sensible Footwear represents a stunning visual archive of LGBTQ+ history, and has been described by the Guardian as "an amazing, joyous panorama". Kate will be in conversation with local cartoonist David Shenton, himself a…

“What does the hard look do to what it sees? Pull beauty out of it, or stare it in?” Denise Riley asks in her poem ‘Outside from the Start’. Obscurity in poetry is often seen as making the already-difficult more difficult, more elusive, more elitist, more difficult to “get” - as if there is anything to get. What if, as the poet and painter Etel Adnan writes, “Some things are not meant to be clear, obscurity is their clarity. Obscurity is not a lack of light. It is a different manifestation of light, because it shows you things.”

Page poetry has yet to catch up with Spoken Word when it comes to the use of rhythm, breath and tone of voice in live poetry readings. In this workshop we will listen to recordings of three very different poets perform their poetry to a contemporary audience and discuss what works, and what doesn't.

Industrial civilisation has no future. It requires limitless economic growth on a finite planet. In his "brave and necessary" (Paul Kingsnorth) book, Rupert Read explains how - sooner rather than later - the global capitalist system will come to an end, destroyed by its own contradictions. Along with Samuel Alexander (Research Fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute), Read grapples with the full gravity of the human predicament - and asks the tough questions. What is to be done? How…