A Building a Better World with Words online event in collaboration with Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature.

Philippe Sands QC, author of the best-selling and multi award-winning East West Street, will be discussing his latest book, The Ratline, a story of love, lies and justice. Stephan Collishaw is the founder of Noir Press, translating Lithuanian fiction. His novel The Song of the Stork is a story of hope, love and survival, of one woman finding a voice as the voices around her are extinguished. They will both be in conversation with Keith Kahn-Harris.

You can watch live on Zoom or YouTube, and suggest questions for the authors (if you’re watching on Zoom). The event will be BSL-interpreted, and a subtitled recording will be published on the Five Leaves and NUCoL YouTube channels after the event.

The Building a Better World with Words project is funded by Arts Council England.

This event is free. To register, please visit the event page on NUCoL’s website.

A Building a Better World with Words online event in collaboration with Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature.

Faber Academy’s bestselling alumni, Rachel Joyce and SJ Watson will be in conversation with Sandeep Mahal. SJ Watson’s first novel, Before I Go To Sleep, became a phenomenal international success. His new jumpy thriller, Final Cut, is all about time and memory – how and what we remember and how and what we try to forget. Rachel Joyce is the award-winning author of the world-wide bestseller, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Her new novel, Miss Benson’s Beetle, is an uplifting, irresistible novel about two very different women on a life-changing adventure where they must risk everything, break all the rules, and discover their best selves – together. They will be in conversation with Sandeep Mahal about their new books, paths to publication and experiences of film adaptations.

You can watch live on Zoom or YouTube, and suggest questions for the authors (if you’re watching on Zoom). The event will be BSL-interpreted, and a subtitled recording will be published on the Five Leaves YouTube channel after the event.

The Building a Better World with Words project is funded by Arts Council England.

This event is free. To register, please visit the event page on NUCoL’s website.

In the first half Clare and Robert will read from their Waterloo Press poetry collections, Each Other and Blue Wallpaper. Clare’s poems are of love and its endurance while Robert also writes love poems, his signature being the sonnet. He was also published by Five Leaves in our poetry publishing days!

Clare’s memoir is The Missing List (Linen Press), of which Andrea Samuelson wrote:

... In the process of caring for her father during his terminal illness Clare Best finds herself remembering the abuse she suffered… She hopes he will acknowledge what he did so that they can both achieve some closure before he dies. The story is gradually revealed through scraps of information – old ciné films, imagined lists of rules, conversations…                                         

In 1841 the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare escapes from an asylum in Epping Forest and walks home to Northamptonshire. In 1995, with his life in crisis and his own mental health fragile, Robert decides to retrace Clare’s route along the Great North Road… Part memoir, part travel-writing, part literary criticism, A Length of Road is an exploration of class, gender, grief and sexuality through the author’s own experiences and through the autobiographical writing of Clare.

Admission: £4.00 (£2.00 students) including refreshments. Book via events@fiveleaves.co.uk please.

Mark the date!

25 tables of books, eight free talks, cafe on site

Last year at least 400 people came to our third radical bookfair, many staying most of the day to attend the talks by local, regional and national speakers.  We already have stall bookings from Northern Herald Books, Nottingham People’s History, Sparrow’s Nest, Ex-Libris, Motts and Derbyshire Labour History Society and the Anarchist Communist Group!

Please get in touch if you are interest in a stall.

Venue: Mechanics Institute,  3 North Sherwood St, Nottingham NG1 4EZ.

The Mechanics Institute rooms are full accessible.

Free, not tickets or booking required.

Last years talks concentrated on class, labour history and race with speakers including Priyamvada Gopal, Animik Saha, the group behind Prison: a survival guide and Five Leaves’ own Andrew Graves. Previous radical bookfairs have included talks on diversity in children’s picture books and travels in Eastern Europe! What will we do in 2020?

Speakers in 2020 include Dana Mills on Rosa Luxemburg