Online Events 2025
This Must Be the Place: Simon Phipps and John Grindrod
Wednesday 29 January 2025, Zoom, 7.00pm - 8.00pm; £6/£4
Join architectural photographer Simon Phipps and writer John Grindrod as they take us on a tour of some of the amazing modern places in Britain that Simon has captured in his acclaimed books, including Brutal London and Brutal North.
At A Loss: Grief Writing Workshop with James McDermott
Wednesday 5 February 2025, Zoom, 7.00pm - 9.00pm; £20/£15
An inclusive, interactive two-hour workshop with playwright and poet James McDermott, where writers will learn tools and techniques to help them re-see loss, and explore innovative and inventive approaches to writing. James’ new poetry collection, Father Myself (February 2025), explores grief and growth after losing his father to COVID.
Literature and Offence: Mark Rosenblatt with Monika Smialkowska
Monday 10 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan
Is theatre still the ideal venue for exploring challenging, complex and even potentially offensive topics? Dr Monika Smialkowska discusses these issues with Mark Rosenblatt, author of the new play Giant, a fictionalised account of the circumstances leading up to an interview that Roald Dahl gave in which he expressed a series of explicitly antisemitic opinions.
The Age of the Algorithm: Julia Bell with Philip Seargeant
Monday 17 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan
Writer and creative writing lecturer Julia Bell talks to the OU’s Philip Seargeant about how the implementation of AI impacts writers’ freedom of expression, covering topics from augmented writing applications’ influence on style and content to ways that techno-capitalism exploits and monetises human behaviour.
Historical Cancel Culture: Charlotte Gordon with Jupiter Jones
Monday 24 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan
Charlotte Gordon, author of Radical Outlaws, talks to Jupiter Jones about the eighteenth-century writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and how, after her untimely death, Wollstonecraft was effectively ‘cancelled’, due largely to the publication of a scandalous tell-all memoir.
Translation and Censorship: Sawad Hussain/Monica Cure w Daria Chernysheva
Monday 31 March 2025, Zoom, 7.30pm - 8.30pm; £PayWhatYouCan
In this event, we explore literature in translation with a specific focus on censorship and free speech through the lens of two novels that both address these concerns: Liliana Corobca’s The Censor’s Notebook and Bothayna al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library.
Dreams for Beltane: celebrating the First of May
Thursday 1 May 2025, Zoom, 7.00pm - 8.00pm; £3/£2 (selected writers enter free)
Whether you celebrate ancient pagan ritual, International Labour Day or any of the other anniversaries that 1 May marks, submit your poetry, flash fiction or creative non-fiction for our online event, Dreams for Beltane. Entries close on 12 April 2025.