Cultur Vultur / Books & Ideas
Discover author talks, book launches and conversations worth getting out for, across London.
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91 talks and events in the next 7 days
Showing 401–450 of 640 events401–450 of 640 events
Actor and podcaster Tim Downie (Upstart Crow, Toast of London and host of Folklands podcast) talks to author, actor and comedian Rachel Parris about his new book Rituals: A Folk Journey Through The Seasons.
Speaker: Dennis Walder, Emeritus Professor of Literature at the Open University Dennis Walder was born in Cape Town to Swiss German parents and is a graduate of the universities of Cape Town and Edinburgh. He is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the Open University and has published widely on 19th and 20th century literature, including the best-selling Literature in the Modern World. Other books include Dickens and Religion, Athol Fugard, and Postcolonial Nostalgias. His short story The Place (Stand 2011) was runner-up for the V S Pritchette Prize. His latest book, Amid the Alien Corn: A Son’s Memoir (2025) takes its narrator from the bewilderment of childhood and youth towards the unfolding of his mother Ruth’s secrets, long suspected from a pervasive sense of something missing at the heart of his family. Members: Free, Online or Victoria Hall Non-Members: £10, Online or Victoria Hall. To attend in person, please pay on the door Please book, for online link only, by 1pm on the day of the event Please join us for a drink in the Members’ Room after the lecture
From alt-rock bassist Melissa Auf der Maur—of Hole and Smashing Pumpkins fame—comes a photographic love letter to the last analog decade.
We've got another exciting signing event to announce in partnership with the incredible comics festival, Thought Bubble! Ahead of his appearance in Harrogate on the weekend, the artist Raúl Allén, will be in the shop signing on Wednesday 11th November 2026, from 6-7pm, to celebrate the…
Our book club meets once a month for friendly informal chat about books. In November we will be discussing Shy Creatures, Clare Chambers. Come along and tell us what you think. New members always welcome! Doors at 6.30 Discussion begins at 7.00 Please contact the store if you have any access requirements
Join us for a special evening with bestselling author Patrick deWitt in conversation with Octavia Bright as we celebrate Dodge City.
Come along to this month's Fiction book club, where we will be discussing 'The House of the Spirits' by Isabelle Allende.
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky reigned supreme over Soviet science fiction for more than three decades, building an incredibly rich archive of speculative fiction, full of internal coherence and paradox reflecting profound shifts in Soviet society and ideology. Co-presented by Pushkin House and Klassiki, the season After Utopia: The Strugatsky Brothers on Film explores the long shadow the pair cast over Russian and Soviet cinema with screenings of four classic adaptations of their work.
Join us for an in-conversation with author Rebecca Jane Morgan and activist Charlie Craggs to celebrate the book Deviants and Trailblazers: A History of Trans Activism in Britain. At a time when trans rights are under attack in Britain and beyond, Deviants and Trailblazers tells a story of resilience. Across the book, Morgan chronicles activism and radical change, from key moments including the first legal gender changes in 1944 and the Gender Recognition Act 2004, to the ongoing battle for change. In doing so, Morgan traces the relentless efforts of the trans community, and the grassroots organising that persist today. Our Meet the Author series invites you to learn more about Britain’s queer history from those who are writing it. Each event features an in-conversation with the author, followed by a post-event book signing where you can meet them in person. You can purchase a copy of the book in our shop. Your ticket also includes admission to Queer Britain Museum – explore our exhibitions before the event. EVENT TIMINGS6.30pmEvent Starts6.30-6.35pmShort Introduction6.35-7.10pmIn-Conversation7.10-7.30Q&A7.30-8pmBook Signing8pmEvent Ends ACCESS Queer Britain Museum has step-free, wheelchair-accessible entry.An accessible, gender-neutral bathroom is available on site.Event timings will be shared here in advance.This event will not include BSL interpretation or live captioning.The event will be photographed for marketing and archive purposes.
Derek Jarman's Kicking the Pricks: The Last of England with Richard Scott and Declan Wiffen Originally published in 1987, and out of print for many years, Kicking the Pricks is a key title in Derek Jarman’s cross-disciplinary oeuvre, documenting the making of one of his most important and politically-charged films, The Last of England. Featuring diary entries, interviews and notes from the script of the film alongside writing about his childhood, his father, the process through which he came to terms with his sexuality, his early work as a painter and designer, and his debut as a film director, it is one of Jarman’s most radical publications. Reflecting unsparingly on what he saw as the corruption of the cinema industry, the moral and personal consequences of AIDS, and Thatcher’s Britain, it remains all too relevant. Launching and discussing this new edition from House Sparrow Press will be poet Richard Scott, who has contributed a new suite of found poems to the edition and Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen, whose extensive essay contextualises the work. Welcoming them and hosting will be Gareth Evans, co-editor of House Sparrow Press.
I Liked Rex
Thirty-six new stories from Diane Williams are an event in any avant-gardist’s calendar. I Liked Rex (Granta Magazine) explores the spiritual that arises from the commonplace, with Williams’s brevity and intelligence. Another master of the short form Lydia Davis writes ‘Not a single moment of the prose, here, is what you expect, and even the ordinary is, in the context created by Diane Williams, no longer ordinary; it is fresh, happy and peculiar - or is it we who are refreshed, happy and more peculiar than before after reading her?’ Diane Williams will be reading from her work and discussing it with Lucie Elven, LRB contributor and author of The Weak Spot.
Join us for an evening of conversation with French novelist Anne Serre to celebrate the release of Virtue and Rosalind as part of the Penguin International Writers Series.
Join us for a special night focused on environmental writing across fact, fiction and hopeful futures, with authors E.J. Swift, winner of the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award science fiction book of the year, and Cal Flyn, winner of the 2026 Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing.
Join us for a very exciting evening with bestselling author Ryan Cahill as we celebrate the release of ‘Of Darkness and Light'
Award-winning author Tom McCarthy visits Foyles to celebrate his newest book The Rhyl Poster with Eyal Weizman
Soho Bibles, also known as typescripts, were small typed booklets of erotic stories sold illicitly in the back rooms of Soho's bookshops from the 1950s onwards.
@ Join us for the launch of this illuminating study of one of the most remarkable housing initiatives in European history. With the author, Sara Almodovar Pereira, in conversation with architect and theorist Dr Dubravka Sekulić. ABOUT THE BOOK: The fall of the dictatorship in 1974 saw the start of Portugal’s revolutionary period and with it one of the most remarkable housing initiatives in European history. As an immediate response to the vast portion of the population living in slums and shanties, the SAAL (Mobile Local Support Service) was established to equip impoverished people to build the new homes they needed. Initiated by architect Nuno Portas, the SAAL connected citizens with planners, architects, engineers, and builders to collaborate on the design and construction of new developments, to be built on requisitioned sites as close as possible to the inhabitants’ former homes. The resulting estates were intimately informed by their inhabitants’ needs and hopes. Through their uniquely participatory process they developed a celebrated new architectural language. In this book, Sara Almodovar Pereira collects the experiences and reflections of those who participated in the SAAL, reconstructing this extraordinary chapter in architectural and social history through the voices of those who were there, at the protests and meetings, on the building sites and barracks. The experiences recounted are revelatory, demonstrating truly participatory architecture and offering new understandings of housing as right and provision, far from prevailing paradigms and their perpetuated logic of ‘crisis’. This immersive oral history traces the unfolding of a historical moment at ground level and reminds us of ways of working and building that could transform the future. Sara and Dubravka will talk for around 45 minutes followed by a Q&A. As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available. If you choose ‘book + entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com. Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.
Live in Conversation with Samira Ahmed
Meet artists, designers and makers and try out a wide range of textile making techniques. This event is aimed at learners aged 7-11.
This event is part of the free Lunchtime Lecture series. Booking is recommended but not essential.
An evening celebrating the life and legacy of the counterculture artist, publisher, archivist, curator and collector Roger Ely.
Join BBC Introducing Live and BBC Radio 1Xtra for an evening of live music and discussion
Join Wendy Jones to discuss Utterly Lazy and Inattentive: Martin Parr in Words and Pictures, with Joanna Scanlan and Susie Parr.
In Algospeak, online etymologist Adam Aleksic embarks on an energetic, astonishing journey into language and the internet; revealing the bigger social story of how language shapes us, just as much as we shape it.
Riverwork
Paris-based Canadian poet and novelist Lisa Robertson’s latest book Riverwork centres on Lucy Frost, an insomniac cleaning woman researching and documenting a series of interwoven disappearances, most notably that of the Bièvre River, once the core of Paris’s textile industry but now buried beneath the city’s streets. Lisa Robertson will be in conversation with author Iain Sinclair, another excavator of hidden urban histories.
The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour with special guest readers.
Join internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson in conversation with journalist Tim Blanks, as they discuss her new monograph and the distinctive approach to portraiture that has shaped her practice.
Democratic capitalism, the idea that a combination of free markets and free elections is the optimal system for achieving human flourishing is under attack. Donald Trump has put crippling tariffs on traditional US allies. The world’s richest man Elon Musk has aligned himself with far right parties and claims mass migration is destroying Europe. And across the world extreme parties on the left and right are replacing the centre. Some now openly argue that capitalism would be better without democracy; others that democracy would be better without capitalism.
Join us on 12th November at 7pm for an evening with Stephen Elcock and Jade Angeles Fitton in conversation.
Join us for an evening of conversation with Onyekachi Wambu and Diran Adebayo, in name of their recent book Empire Windrush: Reflections on 75 Years & More of the Black British Experience.
Join us at Waterstones Chiswick for an evening of thought- provoking conversation with Lea Ypi, author of Free, as we discuss her latest book Indignity.
Please join Robert Chandler for an evening dedicated to his latest translation of Vasily Grossman’s writing: From the Front Line: Stalingrad, Treblinka, Berlin – 1941–45.
Join us when we welcome Lamble to discuss their new book UNSAFE: THE CARCERAL ROOTS OF THE ANTI-TRANS BACKLASH with Leah Cowan
Launch event for the third volume of Neil Storey’s acclaimed history of Island Records.
Step into the golden sands of Ancient Egypt with award-winning historian Bettany Hughes as she brings the land of the pharaohs vividly to life.
An afternoon of expert discussion and debate on US politics.
The Eros/Shadow international Workshop builds on key innovations of the landmark Gothic Modern international exhibition led by Juliet Simpson (Warburg Institute), and a new collaboration with the University of Vienna, Wien Museum and Belvedere Museum, to shed light on hidden, yet potent cultures of art, image and world-making in 1900s Vienna. Through the lens of the Gothic, the workshop uncovers pivotal medieval afterlives and encounters in Viennese art, objects, ornament and spaces as visual, material and sensory sites of a cosmopolitan ferment beyond temporal and cultural borders. A series of short talks and linked panel discussion elaborate insights arising from a first workshop held in Vienna in April to reveal new perspectives on early 1900s Vienna as the consummate City of Dream and Desire. Key artist interrelations, Secessionisms and cultural modernisms in print, design and image, are explored in their interactions with a recreating a medieval imaginary detached from nationalistic or archaeological fervour, reworked between 1900s and 1920s as carriers of occulted memory, emotions and vision. Prof. Juliet Simpson will be joined by Prof. Assaf Pinkus (University of Vienna) and Dr Arnika Groenewald-Schmidt (Belvedere Museum, Vienna) , with curators and scholars, including PhD candidates from Vienna and the Warburg Institute. Topics encompass embodied and performative iconographies of the medieval body and image in Viennese spaces of art and visual culture; Oskar Kokoschka as medievalist – expression as a carrier of worlds; Vienna 1900 Belgian encounters – Gothic Gesamtkunstwerk; Broncia Koller Pinell – a medieval Secession, and staging medieval art in the 1920s Belvedere displays. Speakers and panel aim to open dialogues on layered cultural and artistic responses to a ‘borderless’ medieval in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century Vienna. By illuminating hidden actors and imaginaries of memory, making and desirous creation entangled in Vienna’s key sites of modernity, our objective is to build fresh enquiry and approaches to Vienna’s unseen temporalities of art and culture to reshape this field for future scholars. Organized by Prof. Juliet Simpson (Warburg Institute) with Prof. Assaf Pinkus (University of Vienna) and Dr Arnika Groenewald-Schmidt (Belvedere Museum, Vienna).
Join us for an evening celebrating the musical talent and cultural legacy of composer and pianist, Winifred Atwell - the history-making musician who left an indelible mark on generations of British pianists, broadcasters and activists.
Simon Garfield and Jeremy Deller explore the history of the pen and it’s enduring place in our cultural and daily lives.
Come and join us at Backstory for our regular poetry night.
Explore the world of fashion and textiles at Upstart Festival at V&A South Kensington, our annual creative career festival. Come along, ask questions, take part in workshops, share ideas, have conversations and network.
Discover the essential elements for screenwriting success
Join us for a children's workshop with author and illustrator Onyinye Iwu! There will be drawing, reading, and learning about Africa's women leaders.
What is the space for genuine illness in ‘mental health’ discourse? Can we still rely on Freud’s distinction between “neurotic despair” and ordinary human misery? Do we need more or less therapy, and to what private, social, or political end?
@ SPAM Press presents: Fuse Box: Triple Sonnet Crown by Sam Rodilosso w/ readings from Luke Roberts & K Lewis Hood Join us for a collaborative event with SPAM Press, in celebration of Sam Rodilosso’s debut poetry book, Fuse Box: Triple Sonnet Crown. There will be readings from K Lewis Hood, Luke Roberts and Sam, followed by a Q&A between Sam and Maria Sledmere. ‘“Fuse” may be one of my favorite crowns of all time-it as technically as close to perfection as any example of the form that I know. Sam Rodilosso proves himself a brilliant poet, even now, at the beginning of the journey.’ — David Keplinger 🌞 About the book: ‘The sonnet is a fuse box’ in which ‘Lyricism | Wakes up in a cold sweat’. Welcome to Sam Rodilosso’s debut poetry book, a 60pp fury which takes on ‘America’s Monster Project’ and the polycrisis of our current, dilapidating epoch with intelligence and spirit. Fuse Box believes in the power of children to ‘make defence’ against ‘time’s scythe’ and mortality in general. Imagination is amplified by influence. As futurity collapses around us, Rodilosso registers the damage of the present in every iamb of the sonnet’s ornate circuitry, entwined in a triple crown of fuse / engrams / spectacle. This is a poetics of overload and what-the-fuckery, a poetics of voltaic leap and conscientious noticing, digital compression and confession. Fuse Box joins a global choir of people singing against extractivism, exploitation, hyper-militarism and neoliberal fascisms; it scintillates with the meltpoint of a crayola-drawn sun. Fuelled by his father’s saying, I love you Sam, I am time travelling through you, the poet evinces an unwavering refusal of capitalist foreclosures and moves headlong towards a loving future. OUR POETS AND OUR PRESS: Born and raised on the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, Maryland, Sam Rodilosso studied International Relations and Creative Writing at American University in Washington D.C. before transferring to the University of Edinburgh to study English Literature. Since then, he has received a certification to teach English from Cambridge University, and has studied Chinese at Peking University. Sam is interested in the prospects of translation and global literary exchange. Luke Roberts is the author of Bad Omens (2026), Home Radio (2021), Glacial Decoys (2021) and other works of poetry and prose. Beginning to End will be published in 2027 by Nightboat Books. K Lewis Hood is a writer from the East Midlands, currently living on the water in East London. Their poetry publications include Glitch Almanac, an artist book with Martina O’Brien, Bugbear (Veer2, 2021), and infra·structure, with Maria Sledmere (Broken Sleep Books, 2020). With Pratyusha, they co-edited the online ecopoetry journal amberflora. They teach English and Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London. Maria Sledmere is managing editor at SPAM Press and a senior lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. Her most recent publications are the ekphrastic pamphlet Scar Code (Weather Band, 2026), and I don’t have things to tell you (Strange Region, 2026), an epistolary collaboration with Mau Baiocco. SPAM Press CIC is a Glasgow and London-based small poetry press, publisher, magazine and purveyor of literary reading series, established in 2016. It is run by editors Kirsty Dunlop, Maria Sledmere and Maya Uppal. This is a free event, but please RSVP below. Please also feel free to BYOB!
What could replace silicon in the quantum age? Theoretical physicist Felix Flicker explores the remarkable materials powering tomorrow's computers.
Join us as we explore the vast and complex history of Gay, Lesbian & Queer life in London and learn how we evolved into the dynamic and diverse LGBTQI+ community that we celebrate today. We take a deeper dive into the historic suffering that living a gay life endured in the past, leading to the death sentences of many. Learn about the pioneering drag queens of the 1700’s who paved the way for others, the life and loves of Oscar Wilde that led to his imprisonment, the emergence of a gay community meeting in the tea rooms of Central London, the birth of Gay Pride in the 70s and the devastating impact AIDS had on our community in the 1980s. No stone is left unturned in this walking tour timeline of dramatic events that takes you from Charing Cross to Soho Square on an exciting journey through the ages. As we head into Soho, we take in the wonderful sights of London and hear about the historic Queer stories surrounding well known landmarks such as Trafalgar Square and Picadilly Circus. Come on this Queer History Walking Tour to understand it's past and celebrate why London is one of the most exciting and openly free societies of the modern age, with the largest demographic of openly LGBTQIA Community in Europe.
From Lord of the Rings to Planet of the Apes, Marvel and Star Wars, Andy Serkis has shaped some of film's biggest icons. Now, celebrating his new book My Pressures, he steps into the spotlight.
