Leeds Lit Fest 2025

The award-winning Leeds Lit Fest is back, this year running from 14 to 22 June 2025, and bringing together local talent and big-name authors for a lively programme of talks, workshops, performances and spoken word events. Organised by a passionate collective of Leeds-based arts and literature organisations, the festival champions creativity and community, celebrating the written and spoken word in its many forms, and offering plenty of opportunities for audiences to get involved.

We’re looking forward to Wild Women Writing The North (and with a title like that, who wouldn’t be?), seeing author and poet Rachel Bower is in conversation with poet, academic and folklorist Professor Emily Zobel Marshall (Hyde Park Book Club, Monday 17 June, 7pm, £6). Rachel will talk about, and read from, her debut novel It Comes From The River, which came out recently on Bloomsbury, as well as her new poetry collection, Bee (Hazel Press), which features 18 poems exploring the ancient and complicated relationship of help and harm between bees and humans, from Stone Age honey hunters to modern beekeepers. Emily (recently a guest at Chemistry) will share her insights and read from her first poetry collection, Bath of Herbs (Peepal Tree Press), which explores the complexity of mixed-race, hybrid identities and relationships to the English and Welsh mountains, fells, rivers and shorelines from an ‘othered’, unmappable, positionality. The programme says: “Rivers, bees, folklore and wild women. Now that’s a combination you won’t get anywhere else!”

We’ve also got our beady eye on Poetry, Yorkshire and Beyond, bringing together two highly-acclaimed Yorkshire-based writers – Andrew McMillan and Maria Ferguson – for an evening of conversation and performance (Hyde Park Book Club, Wednesday 18 June, 7.30pm, £10). Both are known primarily as poets, but Andrew recently published the highly-acclaimed novel Pity (Canongate), while Maria has written and performed two award-winning one-woman theatre shows. As well as a chat led by acclaimed poet Matt Abbott of LIVEwire Poetry (a Leeds-based national organisation specialising in live events and writer development), Andrew and Maria will be reading from their work. Andrew has published three award-winning collections with Jonathan Cape, physical, playtime and, most recently, pandemonium, and Maria’s second collection, Swell, was published by Penguin in January.

Our third pick is the final festival event (Sunday 22 June, 5pm, £6), when Jo Bell will be presenting her new memoir Boater, A Life On England’s Waterways. A decades-long boater, and liveaboard, poet (and trained archaeologist) Jo was the UK’s inaugural Canal Laureate so she knows a thing or two about her subject – and where better to host a glimpse into the floating world than Leeds’ very own floating bookshop, Hold Fast, onboard National Historic Ship and former Yorkshire Coal Barge Marjorie R (moored at Upper Dock Mooring, Leeds Dock). Blending personal narrative, following a year-long odyssey navigating the country’s canals, and history, Boater reveals the key moments, cultures and communities that have been built along the canal banks – and reflects on how the waterways have been the lifeblood of our country’s development.