London Literary Events - March
Discover exciting literary events to add to you calendar this March
London is bursting with incredible literary events. Here are some of the highlights which you should add to your calendar for March.
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Olivia Laing In Conversation with Philip Hoare At Waterstones Piccadilly
Thursday 6th March 2025
18:30 at Waterstones, London - Piccadilly
Celebrate the paperback publication of The Garden Against Time. Combining history, horticulture, art and biography. This stunning and erudite meditation on the role of the garden through Western culture from the author of The Lonely City ranges from John Milton to Derek Jarman in peerless prose.
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. They're the author of several books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather. Their first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Their work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 they were awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.
Philip Hoare is the author of ten works of non-fiction. His Leviathan won the Ballie Gifford Prize, and the New York Times praised his last book, Albert & the Whale, as the result of ‘the forceful weather system that is Hoare’s imagination’. He lives in Southampton and swims every day in the sea.
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing
‘A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world.
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.
But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.
The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.’
Book your tickets for Olivia Laing In Conversation with Philip Hoare At Waterstones Piccadilly
Exclusive Online Event: Percival Everett In Conversation
Wednesday 12th March 2025
19:00 at Waterstones, Online Events
An exclusive online event with acclaimed author Percival Everett as he celebrates the release of James – shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize – in paperback.
A breathtakingly accomplished retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the enslaved Jim, Percival Everett's tour de force reclaims the character's voice from the literary margins with power, precision and dazzling wit.
Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including Telephone, Dr No, The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and Erasure, which was adapted into the major Oscar-winning film American Fiction.
James by Percival Everett
The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he flees to nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town.
So begins a dangerous and transcendent journey along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise. And together, the unlikely pair embark on the most life-changing odyssey of them all.
Book your tickets for Percival Everett In Conversation here.
Abortion, A History: Mary Fissell In Conversation With Sarah Knott
Wednesday 19th March 2025
18:30 at Waterstones, London - Gower Street
Join for an evening exploring abortion's long political history, with author of Abortion: A History, Mary Fissell.
From classical Greece to Roe v. Wade, a long-overdue history of abortion.
An ancient entertainer unable to work while pregnant; a medieval holy woman performing a 'miraculous termination'; a Reformation-era abortion provider prosecuted as a witch; a Victorian midwife saving her patients from the workhouse. Women have always sought to end pregnancies, and long succeeded. This book tells their stories.
From enslaved and Indigenous herbal knowledge on Europe's colonial plantations to Planned Parenthood's unlikely alliance with postwar churches, Mary Fissell reveals abortion's long politics, tracing how Western societies have policed the practice - or chosen not to. For long periods in our past, abortion was widely tolerated by authorities and ordinary people, and far from straightforward in Christian morality: it was not a crime in Britain until 1803, nor a religious issue in America until the twentieth century.
Whether in France, Scotland, Germany or Italy, abortion controls have always sprung from wider panics around social change - whether times of war, revolution and economic upheaval, or patriarchal anxiety about women's growing independence. As restrictions tighten once more, this vividly illuminating history reminds us that such repression never endures.
‘Vital reading in the aftermath of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, this is a clear and engaging account of the long history of abortion. Fissell tells the story through vivid, engaging and often alarming accounts of real women who tried to end their pregnancies. Abortion has always been an important aspect of women’s healthcare; and, its history shows, it has largely been tolerated. The range of experiences documented by Fissell will inform and educate the wide audience this book deserves to find.’ - Helen King, author of Immaculate Forms
Mary Fissell is the inaugural J. Mario Molina Professor in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on sex, gender and reproduction. The author of Vernacular Bodies, among others, she has featured on the BBC, and in Vice, Slate, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Sarah Knott is a feminist, writer, and historian of women, reproduction and social reproduction, and the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History at Oxford University. She is the author of Mother: An Unconventional History and numerous articles on the histories of women, gender, and emotion. She has served as an editor of the American Historical Review and sits on the editorial board of Past & Present. She has held numerous fellowships, including those from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rothermere American Institute, and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing.
Book your tickets for Abortion, A History: Mary Fissell In Conversation With Sarah Knott here.
The Library Of Ancient Wisdom: An Evening With Selena Wisnom
Thursday 20th March 2025
18:30 at Waterstones, London - Gower Street
Join Selena Wisnom for a revelatory evening exploring the story of the ancient world's most spectacular library, and the civilisation that created it.
When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen: the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful rivals burned Ashurbanipal’s library to the ground - yet the texts, carved on clay tablets, were baked and preserved by the heat. Buried for millennia, the tablets were written in cuneiform: the first written language in the world.
More than half of human history is written in cuneiform, but only a few hundred people on earth can read it. In this captivating new book, Assyriologist Selena Wisnom takes us on an immersive tour of this extraordinary library, bringing ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Through it, we encounter a world of astonishing richness, complexity and sophistication. Mesopotamia, she shows, was home to advanced mathematics, astronomy and banking, law and literature. This was a culture absorbed and developed by the ancient Greeks, and whose myths were precursors to Bible stories - in short, a culture without which our lives today would be unrecognizable.
The Library of Ancient Wisdom unearths a civilisation at once strange and strangely familiar: a land of capricious gods, exorcisms and professional lamenters, whose citizens wrote of jealous rivalries, profound friendships and petty grievances. Through these pages we come face to face with humanity’s first civilisation: their startling achievements, their daily life, and their struggle to understand our place in the universe.
Selena Wisnom is Lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester. A specialist in the interpretation of Mesopotamian cultural sources, Selena's previous work includes Weapons of Words: Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry. She has also written three plays set in ancient Assyria; the most recent, Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria was staged at London's Crypt Gallery in 2019.
Book your tickets for The Library Of Ancient Wisdom: An Evening With Selena Wisnom here.
An Evening With Kat Dunn At Waterstones Tottenham Court Road
Friday 21st March 2025
19:00 at Waterstones, London - Tottenham Court Road
‘Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage the relationship has soured, and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them from London to the Peak District, to the remote, imposing Nethershaw estate, where he plans to host a hunting party. Lenore must work to restore the crumbling house and ready it for Henry's guests – their future depends on it.
But as the couple travel through the bleak countryside, a shocking carriage accident brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla, who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night, Carmilla who stirs up something deep within Lenore. And before long, girls from the local villages fall sick, consumed by a terrible hunger.
As the day of the hunt draws closer, Lenore begins to unravel, questioning the role she has been playing all these years. Torn between regaining her husband's affection and the cravings Carmilla has awakened, soon Lenore will uncover a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk.
Set against the violent wilderness of the Peaks and the uncontrolled appetite of the Industrial Revolution, Hungerstone is a captivating story of appetite and desire.’
Kat Dunn grew up in London and has lived in Japan, Australia and France. She has a BA in Japanese from SOAS and an MA in English from Warwick. She's written about mental health for Mind and the Guardian, and worked as a translator for Japanese Television. Her YA has been published by Head of Zeus and Andersen Press.
Elodie Harper is the award-winning author of the bestselling Wolf Den trilogy, set in ancient Pompeii. The first book in the series, The Wolf Den, was a Waterstones Book of the Month, and the second, The House with the Golden Door, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Her next novel, Boudicca’s Daughter, is out in August 2025. Alongside her career as a writer, Elodie has worked as a reporter at ITV News and producer at Channel 4.
Book your tickets for An Evening With Kat Dunn At Waterstones Tottenham Court Road here.
Erin Kelly & Anna Mazzola In Conversation
Wednesday 26th March 2025
18:30 at Waterstones, Enfield Church Street
Celebrate the recent publication of Anna's new book, Notes on a Drowning, published under the name Anna Sharpe and Erin's latest work, The House of Mirrors, launching in paperback. Erin and Anna will discuss their recent works, as well as the joys and frustrations of writing crime, thrillers and historical mysteries.
Erin Kelly is one of the most well respected and critically acclaimed voices in the crime writing community. Her debut, The Poison Tree was turned into a TV drama and The Skeleton Key, was the Waterstones Thriller of the Month in September 2023, has been optioned for TV and was a Sunday Times top 10 bestseller and a Times number one bestseller in paperback. Kelly's latest novel, The House of Mirrors, is a standalone sequel to The Poison Tree.
The House of Mirrors
‘In the sweltering summer of 1997, straight-laced, straight-A student Karen met Biba - a bohemian and impossibly glamorous aspiring actress. A few months later, two people were dead and another had been sent to prison.
Having stood by Rex as he served his sentence, Karen is now married to him with a daughter, Alice, who runs a vintage clothing company in London. They're a normal family, as long as they don't talk about the past, never mention the name Biba, and ignore Alice's flashes of dark, dangerous fury.
Karen has kept what really happened that summer of '97 hidden deep inside her. Alice is keeping secrets of her own. But when anonymous notes begin to arrive at Alice's shop, it seems the past is about to catch up with them all...’
Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical, Gothic and crime fiction. She also writes legal/political thrillers under the name Anna Sharpe.
Her debut novel, The Unseeing, won an Edgar Allan Poe award. Her fourth novel, The House of Whispers, won a Fingerprint Award for Best Historical Crime. Her fifth novel, The Book of Secrets, is based on a real case from 17th century Rome and was a Times Historical Novel of the Month for March 2024.
The Book of Secrets
‘Months after the plague has ravaged Rome, men are still dying in unnatural numbers, and rumour has it that their corpses do not decay as they should. The Papal authorities commission prosecutor Stefano Bracchi to investigate, telling him he will need considerable mettle to reach the truth.
To the west of the Tiber, Girolama and her female friends are at work, helping other women with childbirths and foretelling their futures. Elsewhere in the city, a young wife, Anna, must find a way to escape her abusive husband. But in a city made by men for men, there are no easy paths out.
Stefano's investigation at the Tor di Nona prison will introduce him to horror, magic and an astonishing cast of characters. He will be left wondering if certain deeds should remain forever unpunished...’
When not writing, Anna works as a human rights and criminal justice solicitor acting for survivors of crime.
Book your tickets for Erin Kelly & Anna Mazzola In Conversation here.
Sophie Lewis & Lola Olufemi: Enemy Feminisms
Thursday 6th March
19:00 at London Review Bookshop
In Enemy Feminisms (Haymarket Books), described by Judith Butler as ‘honest, brutal, historically comprehensive, and brilliant’, Sophie Lewis provides a field guide to the reactionary stereotypes that have affected and distorted feminisms past and present, and propounds a paradigm for a feminism that is inclusive, anticolonial and truly liberational.
Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish the Family, will be in conversation about her work with Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism, Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise.
Book your tickets for Sophie Lewis & Lola Olufemi: Enemy Feminisms here.
Harriet Walter In Conversation With Lucy Hughes - Hallett - She Speaks!
Friday 14th March 2025
20:00 at Daunt Books Marylebone
Dame Harriet Walter talks and reads from her fantastic new book She Speaks!: What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said.
Dame Harriet Walter is one of Britain’s most esteemed Shakespearean actors. Now, having played most of Shakespeare’s female characters, audaciously, she lets them speak their minds.
With new parts for thirty Shakespearean women, written in ‘Shakespearean’ verse and prose, Harriet Walter goes between the lines of the plays to let us hear what she imagines – sometimes playfully and sometimes searchingly – these women were really thinking.
This is a remarkable chance to hear dramatic readings from the book, and Harriet will also be joined by writer, biographer and historian Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who will be asking the questions. Lucy is the author of The Pike, Peculiar Ground and, most recently, The Scapegoat.
Book your tickets forHarriet Walter In Conversation With Lucy Hughes - Hallett - She Speaks! here.
Like what you see? Help me keep creating bookish content by treating me to a coffee. You’ll get really good karma 😉😘