Festival Of Libraries in various venues

Festival Of Libraries is a five-day multi-venue celebration of Greater Manchester’s libraries, returning for the fifth time in 2025 and running from 4 to 8 June.

We’re really looking forward to The Embassy of Utopia, back due to popular demand following 2024’s UK premiere, and featuring newly crowned multilingual city poet Nóra Blascsók. Taking place at Central Library throughout Wednesday 4 June (11am to 7pm), artist and writer David Hartley will host over 60 performances during this year’s EoU event, a collaboration between the UNESCO Manchester City Of Literature and Estonia’s Tartu UNESCO City of Literature.

For The Embassy of Utopia, individuals and community groups have been invited to share reflections on the theme of eco-futures and ecology in the broadest sense, and you can expect poetry, storytelling, academic reflections and music. Performances will be programmed throughout the day (11am, 1pm, 3pm, 5pm) from members of Fuse Manchester, Muslim Social Justice Initiative and the Let’s Talk Rochdale group, international artists from Quebec and Nanjing, and work developed via a special collaboration with the Sonder Radio Community.

Festival Of Libraries – which recently picked up a gong at the Culture Awards – is “a joyful celebration of the role that Greater Manchester’s 133 libraries play in wellbeing, culture, creativity and more”. In 2024, the festival consisted of 115 events across five days and welcomed 44,000 visitors, so expect plenty to check out again this time round. Last year, the festival was opened with a performance by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and his band LYR (Land Yacht Regatta), who unveiled a new song, ‘The Enlightenment’, commissioned by Festival of Libraries and paying tribute to the transformational powers that lie within the walls of libraries.

This festival allows citizens to celebrate the key role that libraries play in civic life. It encourages children, young people, migrant communities and vulnerable groups to use the diverse library service offer creatively. Partner libraries around the city host performances, exhibitions, concerts, art, film, writing classes, and public debates. Writers, illustrators and musicians are commissioned to respond to the vital role libraries play to the people of Manchester, with celebrations such as the annual Inspired By Libraries series featuring a host of ‘in conversation’ events with the likes of Children’s Laureate Joseph Coehlo, actors Christopher Eccleston and Maxine Peake, and musician and spoken word artist Antony Szmierek.

For family-oriented happenings, check out the Festival of Libraries Family Fun Day, 12pm-4pm on Sunday 8 June, and the Look For A Book hunt, which takes place during May half term, 23 May- to 1 June.