Literary Leicester 2022

A podcast about the pleasure, power and importance of books.  In each episode Dr Emma Parker hosts a discussion with a member of the University about one of their favourite books.

The Reading List

Listen again to Adele Parks, recorded live in conversation with her husband Jim at the University of Leicester, as part of Literary Leicester 2022.

In this session, multi-million bestselling author Adele Parks returned to Leicester, where she graduated, to talk about her life as a writer. Adele is the author of 21 bestselling novels including most recently the Sunday Times and ebook Number One bestseller Both of You. She is an ambassador of the National Literacy Trust and the Reading Agency, and in 2022 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature.

00.00-09.12: Welcome from Festival Deputy Director Simona Storchi and University of Leicester President and Vice-Chancellor, Nishan Canagarajah
09.12 onwards: Adele Parks in conversation with her husband Jim

LL22: Day 1 - Parks’ Life: Adele Parks in Conversation

Listen again to Monique Roffey's experiences of writing the Caribbean.

Monique Roffey is an award-winning, Trinidadian-born writer of novels, essays, literary journalism and memoir. Her most recent novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch, won the Costa Book of the Year Award, 2020, was nominated for eight other awards and is being developed into a film. Her other novels have been nominated for or won numerous other awards. She is a co-founder of Writers Rebel within Extinction Rebellion.

LL22: Day 2 - Monique Roffey, Writing the Caribbean

Listen again to Howard Jacobson in conversation with David Brauner, recorded live at the University of Leicester.

Booker Prize Winner Howard Jacobson (The Finkler Question, Bloomsbury 2010) talks about his latest book Mother’s Boy, the story of a writer's beginnings - as well as the twists and turns that life takes - and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be.

LL22: Day 1 - Howard Jacobson: Mother’s Boy – A Writer’s Beginnings

Listen again to a showcase in which the UK's most exciting writers celebrate the novelists and poets who helped put Leicester on the literary map.

Featuring love poems, spirited and tender speech, and musical tributes to the writers who continue to shape and transform Leicester, with a special focus on Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Sue Townsend and Graham Joyce.

In-person tributes to the three writers will be presented by Bali Rai, Lydia Towsey, James Walker, Bobba Bennett, Melanie Abrahams, Jo ‘Spice’ Blackwood and guests, and video and online tributes by Fred D’Aguiar, Mellow Baku, Aoife Mannix and more. Hosted by Carol Leeming and John Berkavitch, and produced by Renaissance One. Also featuring a special performances by acclaimed saxophonist Marcus Joseph, as well as Carlton, Ashanti and Romeo of performance poetry collective Showcase Smoothie.

LL22: Day 4 - Mi Duck, Writers Changing Leicester

Dahlia Books presents a brand new anthology of original writing, with readings from the authors themselves.

An event celebrating the launch of this Arts Council supported anthology writing project. A distillation of creativity fostered by mutual support, the project is led by author Fiona Linday, supported by the University's Centre for New Writing, and published by local publishing house, Dahlia Books. In the foreword, Michael Attenborough, CBE, D Litt. writes: 'A civilised society is one that is in constant dialogue with itself, one of evolutionary discovery and growth.' Performed by the authors, this event includes flash fiction and poetry about living positive lives while sustaining our environment.

LL22 Day 2 - Making Our World Better: Anthology Launch

The University of Leicester’s first Festival of Language and Cultures celebrates Leicester as a city built on a thriving web of cultures and modern languages. Local poet Kaozara Oyalowo and novelist Mahsuda Snaith reflect on the way cultural and linguistic difference inspired their writing. The event also launches an exhibition co-curated by the School of Arts and local school students celebrating their heritage and highlighting the enormous benefits of the cultural and multilingual hybridity that has shaped Leicester’s and Britain’s identity and creativity.

LL22 Day 4 - Spring into Languages

The Vulnerability Studies Network brings together early career scholars from the UK, Canada, and beyond to discuss how the term ‘vulnerability’ is used in different disciplinary and non-academic contexts. The Network continues conversations that were started at the December 2020 Knowledge Frontiers Symposium on ‘security’ held by The British Academy and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Listen to our conversations here!

Workshop 1 A Conversastion About Vulnerability And Self - Care

Dr Sarah Graham - Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

Marianne Mincher - Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Dr Kate Loveman - Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Dr Felicity James - No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

Dr Ben Parsons - The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall

Sarah Wood - The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend

Multi-award-winning crime and spy novelist Mick Herron’s ‘Slough House’ spy-novel sequence became a celebrated TV series in 2022. Slow Horses stars Gary Oldman and Kristen Scott Thomas. It follows a group of MI5 spies whose failures have seen them thrown into the dustbin that is Slough House, the department where the bureau’s worst are put out to pasture. Brutal, funny, satirical, Herron’s been dubbed ‘the new John Le Carré’. He has won awards too numerous to list, but include the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and the Capital Crime Best Thriller Award. In 2022, he won the Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year for Slough House.

Mick appears in conversation with the university’s Jean Humphrey Writer-in-Residence, renowned novelist and memoirist, Kit de Waal.

*Photo credit: Mikael Buck*

LL23: Mick Herron in Conversation with Kit de Waal

An event that centres on poetry, conversation, and camaraderie and explores the ways that we use and rely on words to make sense of, and to shape, our lives. TS Eliot Prize Winning poet and literature champion Joelle Taylor, and poet and novelist Patience Agbabi read from their works and explore making change with words in an event chaired by Melanie Abrahams. Experience thrilling performances and be part of a discussion on friendships in and outside the poetry sector and the movements and moments that have impacted our literature/s and communities.

Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry and a novel. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize and was the subject of a Radio 4 arts documentary Butch. C+NTO was nominated for the Rathbone Folio Prize, longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, and won 2022 the Polari Book Prize. It was named by The Telegraph, the New Statesman, The Guardian, The White Review & Times Literary Supplement as one of the best poetry books of the year, as well as DIVA magazine’s Book of the Month, and awarded 5 stars by the Morning Star. She has completed a book tour of Australia including Sydney Opera House (March 2022). C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. A former UK SLAM Champion she founded the national youth poetry slams SLAMbassadors through the Poetry Society in 2001, remaining its Artistic Director until 2018. She is a co-curator and host of Out-Spoken Live, resident at the Southbank Centre, and an editor at Out-Spoken Press. She is also completing her memoirs for publication in 2024, and her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet will be published by Quercus in Spring of that year. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year.

Patience Agbabi is a sought-after poet, novelist, performer and mentor who has spent 20 years celebrating the written and spoken word. A former Poet Laureate of Canterbury with numerous residences and awards under her belt, Agbabi’s work has appeared on both radio and TV and she has toured around the world to festivals and events. In 2014 she was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for New Work in Poetry following her fourth collection, ”Telling Tales”, and in 2004 she was nominated one of the UK’s ‘Next Generation Poets’. Her first middle-grade novel was published by Canongate in 2020.

Event created through a partnership between Renaissance One and the Centre for New Writing for the festival.

LL23: Renaissance One presents 'Family of Words': Joelle Taylor and Patience Agbabi

Multi-award-winning journalist, writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed discusses the role of literature in her life. What does she love about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie? How is she inspired by Arundhati Roy? And does hosting the Booker Prize winner ceremony shape her reading list? Hosted by Emma Parker.

LL23: Samira Ahmed: My Life in Books

Michael Attenborough

A seminar series hosted by the Centre for Victorian Studies at the University of Leicester

Dr Ipshita Nath - 'Land of Pestilence': Death, Disease, and 'Doctorly' Memsahibs in Colonial India

Dr Prashant Kidambi - Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire

Hannah Dennett - Uncovering the Lives of African and Asian Children at London's Foundling Hospital

Several of the UK’s leading authors have formed ‘Writers Rebel’, an arm of Extinction Rebellion, to help voice the Climate and Biosphere Emergency. Listen to Liz Jensen, author of bestselling eco-thriller, The Rapture, Laline Paull, author of The Ice, and Gregory Norminton, author of The Devil’s Highway. They will discuss how writers can ‘write the emergency’, and how activism and authorship can combine.
Liz Jensen is the author of eight novels including the eco-thrillers The Rapture and The Uninvited. Her novel The Ninth Life of Louis Drax was adapted into a Hollywood film. Her work has been short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Award, nominated three times for the Women’s Fiction prize, adapted for theatre and radio, and translated into twenty languages.  https://www.lizjensen.com/ 
Laline Paull’s first novel, The Bees, was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her next novel, the eco-thriller The Ice, involved multiple trips to the Arctic to research. Her latest novel, Pod, is a ‘cetacean epic, an imagined story based in real environmental science and marine biology.’ The daughter of Indian immigrants she was awarded a scholarship to study at Oxford University.  https://www.lalinepaull.com/ 

Gregory Norminton is the author of five novels, most recently The Devil's Highway (4th Estate), and two collections of short stories. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. He lives in Sheffield.  http://gregorynorminton.com/

LL23: 'Writing the Climate Emergency' with Liz Jensen, Laline Paull and Gregory Norminton

A podcast about the pleasure, power and importance of books. In each episode Dr Emma Parker hosts a discussion with a member of the University about one of their favourite books.

Elisha Kiala - Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Val McDermid delivered the 2023 Annual Creative Writing Lecture, organised by the Centre for New Writing and School of Arts, and kindly sponsored by the University of Leicester's Development and Alumni Relations department.

[image of Val by KT Bruce]

Val McDermid - The Annual Creative Writing Lecture 2023

Part of the Creative Climates: Creatively Communicating the Environmental Emergency Research Project, more information available here: https://creativeclimatesleicester.blogspot.com/

Photo credits: John Berkavitch by Olga Galona

No Answers! by John Berkavitch

Celebrated Argentinian author Fernando Sorrentinio reads from his recently published collection of short stories as well as talking about his inspiration as a writer and reader.

Fernando Sorrentino

Last year Andrew Mitchell brought us ‘A Byron Elegy’, with music and dance. This year he is taking us on the voyage of HMS Beagle with shanties and sea songs. Join Andrew and musicians on a journey with Charles Darwin.

Andrew Mitchell, Darwin and the Voyage of HMS Beagle

In the opening decades of the 19th century, Leicester was home to two remarkable women, Elizabeth Heyrick and Susanna Watts, whose writings and involvement in social campaigns were to have a lasting effect on both their Leicester community and on British society. They worked and wrote nationally and locally for the abolition of slavery, the protection of animals, rights of workers in the hosiery industry and prisoners, as well as the poor and aged. They also produced many literary works, including the first ever guidebook for Leicester. This talk will explore their life and works in Leicester and beyond.

Susanna Watts and Elizabeth Heyrick: Leicestershire Authors and Activists in the Early 19th Century

Chair: Dr Harry Whitehead

After a sell-out visit to Literary Leicester in
2012, Will Self is back to showcase his new
novel. Shark is based on real events during
WW2, when the ship which had delivered the
material to be dropped on Hiroshima was sunk
by a Japanese submarine with the loss of 900
men, including 200 killed in the largest shark
attack ever recorded. When Creep, a resident
in the 1970s at the North London therapeutic
community supervised by psychiatrist Zack
Busner, starts to tell rambling stories of
thrashing in the water while under attack from
sharks, Busner must decide whether they are
schizoid delusions or reflect reality.

Self is the author of many novels and books of
non-fiction, including Great Apes, The Book of
Dave, How the Dead Live (shortlisted for the
Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002), The Butt
(winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse
Prize for Comic Fiction 2008), and Umbrella
(shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012).

Will Self

Award-winning poet Patience Agbabi retells
Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales for the 21st century
in her new book Telling Tales. Mining Chaucer’s
Middle-English masterwork for its performance
as well as its poetry and pilgrims, this boisterous
and lyrical collection gives one of Britain’s most
significant works of poetry thrilling new life.

Agbabi is the author of three collections, Bloodshot
Monochrome, Transformatrix, and R.A.W., and she
is a former Poet Laureate of Canterbury. Her poems
have appeared on radio and TV around the world
and she has toured widely with the British Council.

The event is part of the Telling Tales Tour in association
with literature producers Renaissance One.

“A pilgrimage of punks, badasses, broken
hearts, beat poets, silver-tongued fixers, town
criers, beauties, sinners.” Jeanette Winterson.

Please note that this performance features some adult content.

Patience Agbabi

Vice Chancellor Paul Boyle officially opens the Literary Leicester 2014 festival (introduced by Dr Harry Whitehead). Followed by Mark Bostridge. 

Chair: Dr Sharon Ouditt

Bostridge won the Gladstone Memorial Prize at
Oxford University. His books include Vera Brittain:
A Life (shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography
Prize, the NCR Non-Fiction Award, and the
Fawcett Prize) and Florence Nightingale: The
Woman and her Legend (awarded the Elizabeth
Longford Prize for Historical Biography, and named
as a Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2008). He is
currently consultant on the forthcoming feature
film of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth.



Official Opening / Mark Bostridge: The Fateful Year: England 1914

Lawrence Scott is a prize-winning Caribbean novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago. His work has stimulated critical work into the post-colonial novel’s use of magic-realism, carnival, calypso, her/history, storytelling, dialect/standard narratives, identity, landscape, the body, race, religion and homo/sexuality.

Lawrence Scott 2

William Boyd - In Search Of Nuance

Two of the country’s leading writers, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Caryl Phillips, in conversation. Old friends, they discuss their lives in writing, the important role which writing of all kinds can play in an ever-changing world, and many other topics.

A dynamic and enjoyable discussion, chaired by distinguished Professor John McLeod.

Multi-award winning Kittitian-British novelist, Caryl Phillips’ tenth novel, The Lost Child, is published this year. Jamaican-born Linton Kwesi Johnson is among this country’s best-loved performance poets.

Linton Kwesi Johnson And Caryl Phillips in Conversation

The celebrated women’s theatre company, Raving Beauties, as they perform poetry from their edited collection of the country’s leading female poets writing on women’s relationships to their bodies.

Contains strong language and adult content. 

Raving Beauties: Hallelujah for 50 Foot Women

As well as offering personal insights into playwright Joe Orton’s early life in post-war Leicester, Leonie tells her own story – her fight to educate herself, nurture her brother’s legacy and become her own woman.

Chair: Dr Emma Parker

Leonie Orton: I Had it In Me

Alongside readings of responses to her work by Richard Fallon and Isabelle Staniaszek in Victorian costume, Brontë experts Professor Joanne Shattock and Dr Julian North discuss the passions that she rouses in her public. 

Credit: NPG 1452, Charlotte Brontë by George Richmond, chalk, 1850 © National Portrait Gallery, London. Image used under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Charlotte Brontë and her Readers

Closing the festival on a high, we welcome legendary author Fay Weldon to Leicester. Fay will discuss her latest book, Before the War (2016), with Founder Chair of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, Professor Mary Eagleton. They will reflect on changes in the social and literary landscape since the publication of Fay’s first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967), almost 50 years ago.

This event is the first in an annual series of talks and lectures held in partnership with the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association.

Photo credit: DDP / S. Willnow

Fay Weldon in Conversation

The School of Arts at the University of Leicester brings together a number of departments and specialist centres into a community of academic and professional staff, who are dedicated to the success of our students and the quality and impact of our research.

We are carefully bold; we share ideas, examples and experiences, and we learn from each other and from our students.

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