Advance notice of Nottingham Poetry Festival. Readings by well known poets, poetry in pubs, poetry in performance. Bookfair.

Full programme to follow

Join us for a belated 80th birthday celebration for local writer John Harvey (well, he lives in London now, but still comes back for Notts County matches!). John is best known for his crime fiction, but is also a poet with several collections to his name, and he used to edit the little magazine Slow Dancer and Slow Dancer Press.

His new collection, Aslant, will be published by Nottingham’s Shoestring Press

Free, refreshments provided. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Feminist Book Fortnight is a Five Leaves initiative, launched in 2018, when fifty independent bookshops and other organisations set up talks, discussions, book launches, poetry readings and socials to celebrate feminist writing. from all over Britain and Ireland.  Shops have already committed to taking part in 2019, as have the four women’s libraries in Britain.  One shop is in Italy!  More are signing up all the time.

Organisation is decentralised, with Five Leaves providing a website, social media, press support and print.

Feminist Book Fortnight is supported by the Booksellers Association

Please contact bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk if you are an independent bookshop, a literature promoter, library or any other organisation wishing to take part.

Our events: See 16th May event.  More to come!

Five Leaves is pleased to work with the RCN (Royal College of Nursing) trade union to celebrate nurses’ day.

Full details to follow

A Feminist Book Fortnight event

‘All too often the achievements of working class women have been excluded from the history books.  Yet it was these women who often fought the hardest and had the most to lose.  It is up to us to bring to life the hidden history of working class women and their great achievements.  Nan  Sloane takes up that challenge.  She unearths the stories of women who, long before the campaign for women’s suffrage, fought for workers’ rights and played a key role in the birth of the Labour Party.’  Dawn Butler MP

Come and join us for a talk by Nan Sloane followed by a discussion.  Nan is a writer and activist with extensive experience of politics, feminism and the Labour Party.  As the Director of the Centre for Women and Democracy she campaigned to increase women’s participation in both civil society and politics.  She has worked with women political activists in the Middle East, the Balkans and Africa as well as in the UK.

The Women in the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History is published by I B Tauris.

Tickets: £3 on the door, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Can’t tell you the venue, can’t tell you the speaker (though we know!) but this is the annual formal lecture from UNESCO City of Lit in Nottingham. Mark the date. Reveal later…

Five Leaves is pleased to be a partner in this conference, with stalls and events.

Full details to follow

www.nottingham.ac.uk/conference/fac-arts/clas/transnational-radical-film-cultures/index.aspx

Insiders/Outsiders is a UK-wide arts festival which runs throughout 2019 and which examines the extraordinarily rich and pervasive contribution of refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe to the visual culture, art education and art-world structures of the United Kingdom. In every field, émigrés arriving from Europe in the 1930s – supported by a small number of like-minded individuals already resident in the UK – introduced a professionalism, internationalism and bold avant-gardism to a British art world not known for these attributes.

At a time when the issue of immigration is much debated, this illustrated talk serves as a reminder of the importance of cultural cross-fertilization and of the deep, long-lasting and wide-ranging contribution that refugees make to British life.

Monica Bohm-Duchen is the creative director of the www.insidersoutsidersfestival.org and is an art historian.

Tickets: £3 on the door, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Five Leaves Bookshop is organising several events in Nottingham as part of the festival. Contact us for more information.

Lowdham Book Festival ends its twentieth year with its traditional “last Saturday”, including the region’s biggest book fair, lots of free talks for adults plus a children’s programme, a cafe, and a day out in the country (well, ten miles from Nottingham).

The main festival is organised by The Bookcase in Lowdham, but the last day by Five Leaves.

Contact us for stall and event details.

Full programme in due course

Celebrating – not uncritically! – Graham Greene’s writing, and his time in Nottingham. He was converted to Catholicism here, at this Cathedral

Speakers include David Belbin and Michael Eaton

Five Leaves’ bookstall

Full details to follow

The third Nottingham Radical Bookfair… 30 tables from new and second hand booksellers, publishers and organisations and a full supporting programme of talks.

Stalls already booked by Five Leaves, Nottingham People’s History, Northern Herald Books (second hand), Anarchist Communist Group, Ex-Libris (second hand), Verso Books, Notts and Derby Labour History Society, Morning Star, Revolutionary Praxis, Jermy and Westerman (second hand), Sparrow’s Nest Archive, Global Books Marketing, Pluto Press… More to add.

In 2018 we had talks on diversity in children’s literature, trade union organising, Kropotkin, architecture in the former Soviet union, working class poetry, Asian women in Britain, anti-racist scholarship, Stewart Hall, street choirs and Peter Gabriel. No idea yet what we will do in 2019, but save the date!

Cafe on site. The cherry crumble last year was memorable.

A Bread and Roses event

Nottingham Radical Bookfair is trade union supported

The event is free, including the talks