Today sees the rise of nationalism, the return of totalitarian parties in Europe to electoral success, and the rise of the alt-right and white supremacists in the US. Thus, there is urgency for psychoanalysts, with their understanding of cruelty, sadomasochism, perversion, and other mental mechanisms, to speak out.

Dark Times starts with a look at European history in terms of monuments and mourning, before moving into storytelling and the elision of thought and history at this current time, including the brutalities inflicted by ISIS on the Yazidi, and concludes with a meditation on the relationship between cruelty in the early environment and hatred of the other within society, with particular focus on racism in the US.

Tickets: £5, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

“We are pleased to announce that internationally acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane will give our third annual lecture in association with the University of Nottingham, at the Council House Ballroom in Nottingham on the 22nd May.

“The annual UNESCO lecture aims to provide a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share their ideas and promote Nottingham city’s wide-ranging expertise on international literature, literacy and the wider creative economy.

“Robert is renowned for his writing on landscape, memory, place and nature. His books have been widely adapted for film, television and radio, and he has collaborated with many artists, photographers and musicians. Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, perhaps the most eagerly anticipated non-fiction book of 2019, takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet’s past and future, and into darkness and its meanings. Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, it is both an ancient and an urgent work.

“Follow the conversation on Twitter using #UNESCOlecture and @nottmcityoflit

“If you have any enquiries, please contact Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature via email: contactus@nottmcityoflit.org”

This event  can only be booked through Eventbrite. It is currently sold out – add your name the waiting list here – www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/unesco-lecture-2019-with-robert-macfarlane-tickets-56566678458

Join us for the launch of the two new New Walk Editions pamphlets: Linda Zisquit, From the Notebooks of Korah’s Daughter, and Declan Ryan, A Blues Song for Fighters.

Linda Zisquit has published five collections, most recently Return from Elsewhere and Havoc: New & Selected Poems. Her translations from Hebrew include Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach and These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam. For many years she has been Poetry Coordinator and Associate Professor in the Bar Ilan MA in Creative Writing Program. Born in Buffalo, NY, she lives in Jerusalem, Israel where she founded and runs Artspace Gallery.

Declan Ryan was born in County Mayo, Ireland, and has lived mainly in London. His previous pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series in 2014. His work has appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry (US), Poetry Ireland and the New Statesman, among others.

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

A Nottingham Poetry Society event, in association with Happenstance Press – publisher of D.A. Prince and Maria Taylor

D.A. Prince has written two full collections for Happenstance, but her latest with them is a pamphlet where she considers ephemera —rail tickets, a supermarket till receipt, an old postcard, a scribbled note found in a second-hand purchase. You may have a pile of your own half-read books, threatening to topple and expose their markers. What secrets will they spill?

Maria Taylor’s first collection, Melanchrini (Nine Arches), was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. Since 2015, she has been Reviews Editor for Under the Radar, and she blogs at Commonplace.

‘Commonplace’, however, is precisely what she is not. There’s no telling what she’ll do from one poem to the next, which is only one of the things that makes this pamphlet such a delight. As she said herself in a Poetry Spotlight interview: ‘A successful collection is a little world in itself.’ And so it is

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

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

Clive Myer was the director of the International Film School Wales and the Film Academy at the University of Glamorgan. He is an independent filmmaker.

In this talk Clive Myer will be purging the obstructive line between the making of and the theorising on film, uniting theory and practice in order to move beyond the commercial confines of Hollywood. He will be drawing on the ideas of writers such as Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen and flimmakers such as Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis.

The discussion will be of interest to students, academics, and independent filmmakers as well as for anyone interested in new perspectives on culture and film.

Free event, with refreshments provided.

Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

This event forms part of…

Federico García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898  and was executed on 19 August 1936 by nationalist forces in Franco’s Spain early in the Spanish Civil War. He was a poet, playwright,  theatre director and gay. His body has never been found.

He achieved international recognition as a member of the “Generation of 27”, a group of mostly poets who introduced European styles like symbolism, futurism and surrealism into Spanish theatre. His best known work includes Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernalda Alba.

This talk – on Lorca’s birthday – will include short readings from his poetry and plays, and cover his life and work.

Stephen Roberts is Associate Professor and Reader in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies and Head of Department, Faculty of Arts

Tickets: £3.00 on the door, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

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.

Leading up to Nottingham Refugee Week….

Lyndsey Stonebridge will present a  highly topical and timely account of refugee history and literatature, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, and Simone Weil.

She has written the first literary history of modern statelessness that raises vital questions about sovereignty, humanism, and the future of human rights which highlights the importance of modern literature in understanding the challenges of today’s refugee ‘crisis’.

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham.

Chaired by Karen Adler, University of Nottingham Department of History

Tickets: £3.00 on the door, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

In his first book, leading political commentator Aaron Bastani, from Novara Media, conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we might move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society heralds the beginning of history.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone. And it’s a great book title.  In association with Verso Books.

Tickets: £3.00 including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

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