About this Events Guide
Love all things literary? Looking for book events and literature lectures in the North East? Our monthly what’s on guide captures the literature and book chat, lectures, readings and other events.
In current Covid-19 circumstances, most events are online and open to a global audience. However, we still focus on promoting events organised by universities, bookshops, museums and festivals in County Durham, Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland, Teesside, Northumberland and surrounding areas.
If you are organising a relevant book and literature-related event that could be added, let us know.
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Wed 03 17:30 – Online | Matthew Sperling Reading |
 | Matthew Sperling is the author of two novels: Viral (2020), and Astroturf (2018), which was longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. “Both a satire on the social media age and a fast-paced suspense novel, Viral is a nimble commentary on power and control, the lengths people will go to acquire both, and what is at stake when personality and sex are tradable commodities.” Organised by Inventions of the Text.
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Thu 04 10:00 – Online | Decolonising the Nineteenth Century with Deana Heath, Philip Burnett, Roisin Laing |
 | Organised by Durham University Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies.
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Thu 04 19:00 – Online | Tom Stoppard: A Life with Hermione Lee and Rachel Hewitt |
 | The key book for all time on Tom Stoppard: the biography of our greatest living playwright, by one of the leading literary biographers in the English-speaking world, a star in her own right, Hermione Lee. Organised by Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts.
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Fri 05 14:00 – Online | Billy-Ray Belcourt’s Loneliness as the Affective Life of Settler Colonialism with Ann Cvetkovich, |
 | This talk explores loneliness as the affective life of settler colonialism in queer Indigenous (Cree) writer Billy Ray Belcourt’s two volumes of poetry This Wound Is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms. It focuses on how Belcourt draws on queer affect theory and critical race theory in the work of scholars such as Jose Munoz, Leo Bersani, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe – as he explores the relation between sex and death, and between cruising cultures and the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples. And it argues that Belcourt’s innovative fusion of poetry and theory provide new genres for racialized understandings of loneliness and other structures of feeling. Organised by Durham University Department of English Studies.
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Wed 10 17:30 – Online | “Mortal fear and the work of dying in Elizabeth Delaval’s ‘Memoirs and Meditations'” and “Shopping in Romantic-Period England” with Daisy Winter and Nicola Wigmore |
 | All are welcome, so please come along! Organised by The North East Forum in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies.
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Thu 11 17:30 – Online | LGBT+ History Month Lecture: Is the gay novel dead? with Paul Burston |
 | Novelist Alan Hollinghurst declared that ‘the gay novel has had its day’. Nothing could be further from the truth. The political context may have changed, but the need to tell our stories is as strong as ever. Paul Burston is the author of six novels and curator and host of award-winning LGBTQ+ literary salon Polari at the Southbank Centre. Organised by Newcastle University Insights.
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Thu 11 18:00 – Online | An Audience with Trevor Wood |
 | A part of the ‘South Tyneside Libraries in Conversation with the Northern Crime Syndicate’ series. Organised by The Word.
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Thu 11 19:00 – Online | Wanderers: A History of Women Walking with Kerri Andrews and Joanna Taylor |
| Wanderers: A History of Women Walking (Reaktion Books Ltd., 2020) is a book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Organised by Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts.
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Fri 12 13:00 – Online | Future Theory Seminar |
| A Future Theory research seminar. Organised by Durham University Department of English Studies.
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Thu 18 19:00 – Online | Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape with Cal Flyn and Ella Mershon |
| Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (William Collins, 2021) is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place. Organised by Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts.
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Thu 25 18:00 – Online | An Audience with Robert Scragg |
| A part of the ‘South Tyneside Libraries in Conversation with the Northern Crime Syndicate’ series. Organised by The Word.
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Thu 25 19:00 – Online | A Natural History of Ghosts with Roger Clarke and Rachel Hewitt |
| A Natural History of Ghosts (Penguin, 2012) is the first comprehensive, authoritative and readable history of the evolution of the ghost in the west, examining the behaviour of the subject in its preferred environment: the stories we tell each other. What explains sightings of ghosts? Why do they fascinate us? What exactly did the haunted see? What did they believe? And what proof is there? Organised by Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts.
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Fri 26 13:00 – Online | Digging up the Past: Contested Territories and Women Archaeologists in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland with Dr Maddy Pelling |
| An Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century research seminar. Open to Durham University community only. Organised by Durham University Department of English Studies.
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