Sarah-Clare Conlon

Charlotte Eichler launches her debut collection, Swimming Between Islands, with an online event hosted by Carcanet Press and fellow poet Rebecca Goss.

Manchester’s newest library will be celebrating International Mother Language Day on Thursday 23 February with free events and refreshments provided in the library.

Poet, editor, and curator of literary events Hannah Stone talks to Ian Duhig in this special Leeds Lit Fest edition of Nowt But Verse.

Poet, playwright, memoirist, performer and broadcaster (and until recently the Chancellor of the University of Manchester) Lemn Sissay OBE presents his life story My Name Is Why, at Carriageworks Theatre.

Join Abbi Parcell and Ruby Seddon-Wilson at the newly renovated Portico Library to discuss some of the histories and texts that have inspired and empowered LGBTQ+ people over the years.

Join Eric Gregory Award winner Joe Carrick-Varty online as he launches his debut poetry collection More Sky, out with Manchester’s Carcanet Press.

Join the Radical Reading Book Group to discuss a book from The Reading Room Library – which you can find at Left Bank Leeds in collaboration with Pluto Press.

As part of Leeds Lit Fest 2023, running from 25 February to 5 March, internationally bestselling author Catriona Ward talks to Dan Coxon about being the only woman to have won the British Fantasy Awards’ August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel three times.

Prize-winning author Gwendoline Riley is on our list of favourites, with the likes of early novels Cold Water and Sick Notes featuring Manchester as a backdrop, and here she’s talking about highly acclaimed and toe-curlingly tense tome My Phantoms.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s House has already celebrated the author’s novels Cranford and North And South, and in 2023 it’s the turn of Mary Barton.

We’re looking forward to hearing from Mark Pajak’s debut poetry collection Slide, not least because it is one of the 10 books shortlisted for the prestigious TS Eliot Prize.

It’s like all your Christmasses have come at once at Blackwell’s this December, as the bookshop hosts a two-for-one Salt Publishing special, launching both the Best British Short Stories 2022 anthology and the brand-new Modern Stories series.