It’s the second Poets & Players of 2024, back at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on Saturday 27 April with an afternoon of words and music, featuring readings by Peter Sansom, Carrie Etter and Anita Pati.

It’s your annual chance to join readers and writers alike at this free event when 16 independent publishing houses will be setting out their stalls at Manchester Central Library for the sixth (we think!) Northern Publishers’ Fair, organised by Manchester’s own Fly On The Wall Press.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester and the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth have once again teamed up, bringing a new short season of events to a screen near you this May to take a look at the friendship between two giants of Victorian literature: Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell.

Head to Manchester Poetry Library for its brand-new spring/summer poetry reading series – first up is poet and academic Jason Allen-Paisant, whose second collection of poetry, Self-Portrait As Othello, won the super-prestigious TS Eliot Prize in 2023 not to mention Best Collection in the most recent Forward Prizes.

New Calder Valley reading series Poetry at the Dusty Miller continues apace, with its line-up invited by Carcanet-published Carola Luther and Judith Willson. The three guests on Tuesday 7 May are the poets Lucy Burnett, Martin Kratz and Kim Moore, so you can expect a real meeting of minds.

We’re loving that this year we don’t have to wait until October to welcome great writers to Manchester Literature Festival, and one we’re really looking forward to in the new spring programme (this on 10 May) is “accidental literary grande dame” (New York Magazine) Olivia Laing, according to The Observer “simply one of our most exciting writers”.

Liverpool’s WoWFest 2024 gets underway on 2 May and rounds off with TS Eliot Prize winner Joelle Taylor reading from The Night Alphabet and chatting about it to Roger Hill on 30 May – in between join Salena Godden on 11 May as she presents her latest collection, With Love, Grief and Fury.

Kate Feld has a book out and we couldn’t be happier – Deeryard is a new pamphlet of prose poetry and photographs, published by Manchester independent press Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers. Join her at the launch on 23 May, with readings by poet friends Mick Conley and Lydia Unsworth.

The fourth Festival Of Libraries is a five-day multi-venue celebration of Greater Manchester’s libraries happening 13 to 16 June.

Manchester Literature Festival runs from 4 to 20 October and presents inspiring live literature and spoken word from international writers and home-grown talent.

Each year, the team at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House on Manchester’s Plymouth Grove picks one of the famous 19th-century author’s texts to take – in modern parlance – a deep dive into: in 2024, it’s the turn of Wives and Daughters.